


Hellfire

by Cards_Slash



Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-30
Updated: 2016-01-30
Packaged: 2018-05-17 05:38:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 44,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5856241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cards_Slash/pseuds/Cards_Slash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Malik had come to the Great White City in search of his brother who had been taken by slavers.  He had heard wild rumors of the depravity of the citizens but it did not prepare him for the reality of it.  The worst was Altair, the Judge of Slave Affairs, who murdered Malik's people in the name of justice.  </p>
<p>(or; Altair is obsessed with Malik Frollo!style.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hellfire

**Author's Note:**

> for Komakirin on tumblr. Truly an incredibly darkfic to include the following: mentions of rape, graphic violence, minor gore, mentions of underage rape, character death, slavery, and so much blood.

Altair had been standing by the open window of his office, arms behind his back, looking down on the revelry in the streets. The Solstice had overtaken the holy city; the whores were dancing in the streets wearing shimmery clothes and dangling jewels. Their bodies were twisting to the beat of the music played by the dark-skinned natives that drew in the righteous men of the city. Down on the street, the stench of bodies would have been overwhelming. The combination of wet lust and slick sweat during the annual parade was far greater than even the acrid stench of the true Goddess’ burning fury could manage. 

“Sir!” followed the sharp sound of the quick-footed Enforcer crashing into his door. The urgent gust of his breath was followed by a gulp of air and the pitiful whine of, “sir, there’s been an incident.”

“Has there?” Altair asked without looking away. Down there, down in the streets, the sons of the great houses were frolicking in the crowd of whores and slaves, sneaking around to make a game out of who could molest the most. They were quick-footed and small-dicked fools, invoking the wrath of pagans who worshipped base, blood-magic and served no higher power. The slaves they raped were enemies that the stupid boys couldn’t begin to truly understand. 

There was an echo of intractable screaming from the floors beneath his office. It echoed up the tunnels that led to the Eternal Flame and ricocheted uselessly over the impassioned cries of the fool standing in the doorway saying, “its Dillon, sir. He—the woman has him.”

Altair let a breath out through his nose and turned away from his post. He picked up the silver dagger from its resting place on his desk. It was cold (always _cold_ ) in his fist as he pushed his knuckles against the sagging fool to remove him from the path and strode out into the hall. There was a sloping staircase that led down to the lower levels of the Judgment building. His boots made dull sounds against the polished stone floor that echoed uselessly around the empty meeting hall. There was no official business during the Solstice. It had been decided by lesser men (certainly not him) that there was wisdom in allowing the foul underbelly of the city to have this single day to celebrate their beliefs. 

_There is no harm in this celebration of our Goddess_ , the old men had said. Then they went home to sip their imported wines and listen to the crash and thunder of the raucous display of wanton filth that was parading through their street. They went to sleep on their fine-silk-sheets while their sons were raping the slave women in alleys. Heedless of the damage that the mongrel children born of the unholy unions did to their city. 

The old men did not understand that the slaves—the _mages_ —that had been taken from behind the wall were growing in number. The old men saw the bare-backed slaves in the market, the little washing girls with their slow-budding breasts that scrubbed the oily soot off the walls of the shops and homes and they felt _safe_. The old men used brands and arrogance to assure themselves they were safe but the mages were growing in resolve and _anger_ like a great living beast that was swelling to full life under their very noses.

Altair went down the steep staircase to the sooty tunnels that led to the barracks of the condemned. The heat was immense in the tunnels. The very end of them fed directly into the arena of the holy fire itself. Altair did not have to go far before he found Dillon on the ground with blood pouring out of his mouth. He was bent over, puking the lining of his stomach: thick and stringy as his body jerked and convulsed with the effort. “Kill him,” he said to the man trailing behind him.

“Sir?”

“Or let him die this way,” Altair said. He did not stop as the light in the tunnel went dim. The clever bitch that put the curse on Dillion was extinguishing the lights as she went. The blackness of the air was smoky with ash but it was cold as it rushed at Altair’s exposed face. His hand tightened around the blade as the apologetic whimpering of the man behind him did a poor job of offering comfort to Dillion in his final moments. “Stay in the light,” he said.

In the dark, his breath was still in his chest but the smell of the fire burning off the flesh and bone of the heathen sacrifices that were fed into it filled his chest and stomach with a twist of _fear_ that surpassed anything rational. There was no sight more awe-inspiring than the flame at its highest point. There was no sound or smell more basically _terrifying_ than the flame chewing through its victims. It was fear for _survival_ that drove his heart to beat faster in his chest; a primal urge to _live_ that cleared away the distractions of the world. 

He did not see the mage before the smell of her filthy blood made him turn his head. He did hear her footsteps before her hand touched his arm. He could feel the dampness of her grip through the sleeves of his robe and shifted his grip on the dagger to drive it into her pliant flesh. The noise she made was not pain but the rabid-screech of an animal that did not want to die. He shook her hand off his arm and grabbed her by the hair.

There were no words in her babble, nothing to make sense of in the endless screaming that spewed from her mouth. Her feet gave out on her as he pulled her down the tunnel. The blackness gave way to a puddle of low light from the lanterns she had not extinguished. Her screaming was matched by the piteous wailing of the condemned. There was a station at the side of the tunnel where the men who protected the future sacrifices were meant to stand but the post had been abandoned. Altair could not guess at the reason it was left unattended but it was an advantage he was willing to exploit and therefore a mistake he was willing to forgive. He set the dagger on the table nearest the wall and reached across it to grab on of the braided leather cords with the noose-like loop at the end. The mage was spitting bloody-drool at him as she pressed both hands against her bleeding gut. Her warm skin had gone sallow from blood loss but there was still fight enough in her eyes. 

Altair looped the noose end of the cord around her neck and wrapped the other end around his wrist twice before clutching it in his fist and picked up the dagger before the slave girl could get her filthy hands on it. He dragged her away from the station, his boots kicked at the mud made out of her blood mixing with the dust and soot on the ground beneath them. Her pitiful wailing came to a snorting standstill as the noose tightened on her throat. She was obliged to walk or lose her ability to breath. 

The tunnel sloped up after the barracks, it went steadily toward the surface where the groaning weight of the eternal fire pressed down against the packed earth. There was no door to protect from the heat at the end. It came like a great sweltering fire, enough to make a man feel as if the flesh were burning away from his bones. Altair had been here before (many times) but he had never once stepped in front of the blackened staircases that led to the top of the Eternal Flame’s bowl without the same surge of awe and _fear_. 

He hesitated (but only a moment) before he strode forward and dragged the woman after him. The stairs were four stories high, the wood groaned and creaked when he stepped down. The oily stench of burnt flesh was seared into the wood by the proximity to the fire. Sweat soaked through his clothes in a matter of seconds but he did not pause. He pulled the slave woman up-and-up until she was stumbling across the platform at the top. When he looked at her, with her stomach slit across and the pink beneath it bulging slowly outward, the blood on her thighs and the way her eyes were blackened even as she clawed at the braided leather biting off her ability to breath, he expected to see the same fear in her that he felt. 

This was her death. More than a simple death, she would burn for _eternity_ trapped in the fire of the true Goddess. 

But, there was no fear in this slave’s face. Her hands dropped away from the noose at her neck. The blood that was spread across her hands took on an unholy shimmer as she stared him down. Sweat was rolling down her face, catching on the tip of her nose and her chin. “All evil must be answered for,” she said. 

Altair meant to say that her curses and her pagan beliefs were of little consequence to him but she ran past him toward the fire that snarled and snapped at his back. He watched her leap off the end of the platform with more poise and grace than any simpering sacrifice that he had ever seen before. The fire seemed to reach up with greedy jaws to happily suck her in. There was no screaming as she fell, not even the slightest sound of fear, in those final seconds before she was consumed by the flame. 

He wiped the silver blade on his robes and went back down the stairs. He had just reached the bottom when he met his Enforcers leading a line of dull-eyed slaves toward the steps. Altair had not succeed (much or often) in convincing the old men of the city about the severity of the mage threat but he had successfully petition to make it illegal for mages-and-slaves to have sex with citizens. 

The Solstice was a disgusting affair that was a shame to their city, but it was also a reaping. Altair sent his Enforcers into the city to gather up the trash left behind by the rich man’s sport. They combed abandoned alleys and empty storefronts, peeked through the bazaar and swept along the docks to find the stunned and wounded. They were all brought to the fire and the city was better for it.

In the morning, the missing slaves were reported to the Judgment building and small reparations were paid for the lost property.

“Sir,” the senior Enforcer said to him.

Altair nodded his approval and continued on his way. It was only imagination that the ducked-head slaves were glancing at him as he passed them. 

\--

“You’ll have an awful time getting into that city if you don’t come by boat, boy,” was what the old man had said. They were sharing a loaf of bread covered with a spread made of some kind of nut. Malik couldn’t have guessed at the contents (and wasn’t so picky after travelling so far). The old man had one eye and only two fingers on his hand but his nearly toothless grin was no less threatening for his physical lacking. “Looking how you look.” His wheezing laugh was a sad acknowledgement to the inhuman nature of the men that fell to the wrath of the Great White City. 

“I’m not a slave,” Malik had said.

The boats that brought the men like him to this awful foreign soil were soul-stealing places that he’d only heard about in nightmares. They were filthy beasts belching fire as they ferried free men from one shore and sold them as slaves on another. Malik had no intention of being caught (intentionally or unintentionally) by the slavers that came to steal mages to feed the greed of lesser beings. 

Yet, in his ignorance, he had assumed the Great White City would be easy to breech. In his mind he had imagined it as a place of great suffering, one long solemn cry of his people nearly consumed by the primitive shouting of pale-skinned men declaring the glory of the One True Goddess. 

He could not have imagined this, the great city that gleamed like an eyesore of black-sooted white stone, rising above the rich dark soil of the earth for an eternity. There were three gates and a port that granted access to the city. Each gate was guarded by a force of numbers that Malik had never seen before. A great mass of bodies that outnumbered (easily, by far) any gathering of men he had seen before. He had hid himself in a sparse clutch of trees and watched the weary travelers begging for access to the city. They were inspected by men (priests by his guess) at the gates. He watched them be stripped and harassed before they were admitted or sent away. 

It was hard to understand the words that they used. The common language he’d found with the villages he’d passed was similar-but-not-the same as the words these priests used when they shouted at the begging travelers.

The dock was his only hope. Malik tracked the smell of water to the great sea that would take men (like him) to Aminali’s great port. He’d stood with his boots in the dense and sticky mud watching the lazy trickle of the currents pulling out toward the sea and the ocean beyond it. The water itself seemed peaceful but _ominous_. The promise that it offered him far more sincere than the old man’s wheezing laugh. 

Malik could have turned around. He could have walked back along the footsteps that he’d left with his conscience clear by the knowledge that he’d _tried_. He had put more effort into tracking his brother than any mage had ever put into looking for the kidnapped and lost. While they were satisfied with running through the trees to the edge of their forest and watching the caravans full of their brothers-and-sisters disappearing, Malik had dogged at the wheel ruts and the echoes of their path to the very gates of the city itself. 

When anger came, it sizzled in the ley lines long-ago seared into his skin. It tingled in his palm and up his forearm to burrow down into his veins. It spread like spiderwebs, thin and long, all across his shoulders to the pulse point in his neck. But it was _cold_ in his heart. Malik pulled off the clothes that he’d worn when he ran from his home. He dropped the clothes on the bank of the sea and stepped into the water. It pulled him down—a great frigid, black death—and he allowed it for a moment. He found the current that pulled him outward and let it carry him toward the city. 

It was night and the air was filled with the smell of soot and burnt bodies. He washed up on the shore past a series of docks that led to a great complex of rooms and fences. There were men with lanterns walking the perimeter. Malik crept to his feet in the thick, sticky mud and moved away from the men with the lanterns toward the welcoming sound of music and laughter. 

There was light pouring out through an open door and odd little bulb lamps that provided enough gray light to see the red-faced pale men rutting against petite women. Malik was as shocked to see such a display of wanton debauchery (out in the open, at least) as the dark-haired woman that came through the door was to see him standing there naked. She was dressed in fine-fine clothes, a vision in burgundy red with dark (dark) hair and skin that was neither the sick-pale of the fucking men or the darker browns of the girls that tolerated the assaults. 

The woman did not scream when she saw him but turn her head toward the door, “bring me a blanket,” she said. And her order was followed with efficient obedience. A blanket was handed to her within a moment and she strode forward (sharp heels against a wood floor) to hold it out to him. “If you expect to last the night, you really must find something to wear.” She shook the blanket.

Malik understood but couldn’t speak the language she was using. He took an indecisive step toward her and she threw the blanket at him. While he wasn’t certain he wanted to accept the help, instinct guided him to catching the blanket and fear at the sudden wealth of noise coming from behind him caused him to throw it hastily around his shoulders. The woman had moved while he wrapped himself and slid her arms around his body to pull him up toward the house.

“Don’t you worry,” she said loudly, “I will take care of you.” She pulled an extra roll of the blanket up over his head and pushed him through the door. He stumbled on the threshold and wished he hadn’t. Inside was worse than the porch outside. There was no modesty inside of the whore house where the women of every color cavorted with men spilling drinks and speaking too fast-and-filthy for him to make out the words. The smell of their bodies and the stink of sex was as thick as smoke inside. 

There was a catcall that followed him through the great room until the woman shoved him through a doorway and into a private hall. The lavish extravagance of the outer room was plain-faced in the private hall. She stopped pushing him and slid around to guide him up a set of stairs and into an undecorated room with a single bed. There she reached up and flipped the blanket away from his face.

“A mage,” she said. Her smile was a confusion of awe and fear. “A _real_ mage. There hasn’t been something like you that washed up on our shore in decades.” Her hands were inviting but firm when they motioned for him to show her his arm. Her fingers were pale against his skin as she traced the red-violet ley lines across his palm and up to his elbow. “The people that live in this city don’t believe in anything.”

Then she released him as suddenly as she’d taken his hand. Her skirts twirled around her legs as she did a spin and ducked down to pull a trunk out from under the bed. It was long and flat but inside were layers and layers of folded clothes. She went through it with efficiency and laid out a long-white shirt and pants and a bright red sash. 

“I can’t stay, the girls don’t like to be left alone too long. If you are still here when we close, I’ll bring you food. But you shouldn’t stay in this city. They’ll kill you.” Then she fixed a smile back on her face and went back toward the raucous noise of the rooms below.

\--

Altair had not been granted a position through the benefit of a wealthy family. It was a widely known secret that he was an orphan as a boy, given to one of the Priests that staffed Aminali’s Sacred Cathedral. This lack of a decent pedigree was often the source of the insolence that shone brightly in the eyes of the lewd, lazy boys that filled the rooms of the wealthy man’s home. 

When good manners demanded it, he found himself sitting at the long table of rich men, listening to the pretty-pale-wives talking about their time in the market and the decline of decent morals.

Men said things like, “oh it’s just a bit of fun. It’s the same as what I did when I was that age! Solstice is a time for boys to see what kind of man they’ll become. If I were a few years younger, I’d go as well.” 

Sons, pleased-as-punch, would smirk at their plates. The black tally of their conquests were pock-marked-little black spots on the boys’ wrists. “It’s nothing,” the son said, “I wouldn’t care if they stopped it all together. But that’s what you’re trying to do isn’t it?”

Altair did not eat food prepared by slaves. The little light skinned server girls with bells on their feet and fancy collars on their necks were mongrel children—possibly this smug boy’s sisters—but their mothers were full-blooded pagans with the memory of the forgotten places of their ancestors cut into their bones. 

“I think there are better pursuits for boys than chasing after easy targets. That is an impressive tally,” Altair nodded at the black spots visible just above the boy’s shirt sleeve. “Ten? Eleven?”

“Ten,” the boy said. He was licking the corner of his mouth, looking to his father for approval as he grinned blatantly at his own spectacular feat. “None of them easy.”

“Your endurance is admirable. Strong men are necessary for a strong nation. Aminali is truly blessed to have such a skilled killer to purge the filth from its shore,” Altair said. He was thirsty but he did not drink the wine in the glass that sat in front of him. His back was straight against the wooden seat. “Ten is admirable indeed. If you were the first to claim all of them, I should give you a recommendation to the academy. You are personally responsible for a full fifth of the sacrifices that fed our flame last night.”

The Mother was looking to the side and not at him. The Father was caught between approval and fear but the boy (oh the boy) was staring back at Altair with such open hostility it was amazing he had not made a move to lunge across the table. His hand was creaking with bitter tightness around the handle of the knife he had been using to cut his meal to pieces. 

“Don’t be sorry for them,” Altair said. “Be glad that I did what you were too great a coward to manage. You spilt their blood. Did that excite you? I saw one with blood on her face in the shape of a hand. It could have been your hand. Did you clean your dick and spread it on her face? How bold of you.”

“That is enough,” the Mother said. “We are always proud to have such a righteous man in our home but this is a table and such talk is really uncalled for.”

“Of course,” Altair said. He looked away from the boy’s unanswered fury and inclined his head to the Mother. “I apologize. You were telling me about the lady club’s attempt to sell ribbons to raise money for the Advent this year.”

Dinner proceeded with a long strain of small talk before he was ultimately excused. There were the expected promises of another dinner to be set at some unknown point in the future that neither of them were interested in keeping. Altair stepped out onto the street and watched the slaves turn their sneering faces away from looking at him. 

He walked to the end of the street without incident. No man spoke to him and no slave made even the most passing accusation at his back. Inside the long robe of his station, he curled his hand around the black-handled-knife (cold in his hot palm) and he turned down the long street that led to the second row of house for second-class citizens (such as himself).

The boy did not come to avenge his pride and Altair could not shake the sensation of disappointment that followed him all the way to his house. He stood in the front room with his grip so tight around the black-handle of the silver knife that he could hardly bring himself to unclench his fist. 

\--

Malik’s occupation at the whorehouse was an unintended layover. He had meant to leave while the woman was gone but he’d made the mistake of sitting on the bed after dressing and had woken up the next morning to the smell of fresh breakfast and the general chatter of many voices coming from the stairs below. He followed the noise of it (too great and too varied for him to understand) and found a room full of women sitting around in chairs or laying on cushions nibbling at breakfast. 

The woman that had rescued him the night before was sitting in the center of the seeming chaos, sorting out coins into different bins. As soon as the women saw him they simply ceased speaking. Discretion (if not embarrassment) made him push his palms against his thighs and wish for a higher collar to cover the tendrils of the ley lines that started behind his ears and spread like an odd purpled rash down the back of his neck. His skin had tanned dark from the summer season but the ley lines were such a contrast that they were impossible to overlook. 

“Speak slowly, girls,” the woman said.

“Claudia,” one of the ladies at her side said. “What is that doing here?”

Claudia, (the clear leader), turned her head to offer a slight frown for the rude question before she dismissed it and the woman who spoke it with a dainty wave of her fingers. She offered the empty seat to Malik and another woman hastily brought a plate of fried bread and a variety of greens and beans to him. He was offered his choice of utensils and chose one at random rather than trying to assess which would be best. “You are safe in our house when the clients are out.”

“Are we safe in our house?” someone asked.

“Do you know what he is?” Claudia asked. Then she reached both of her hands toward his arm and only stopped when he tensed. It was a brief stop as she inclined her head in apology (or something that must have been very similar to it) and said, “may I show them?”

Malik did not let her touch him but stood up and untied the sash over the long white shirt and tugged it up over his head. He held it in one hand as the women reacted to the display of latent magic tunneled beneath his skin. Ley lines worked in unison, every line fed into another into another until they poured into the blossom that was situated directly over his heart. He’d crafted deeper tunnels that were harder to see, that dove into his arteries and led to his heart. Kadar had called him a fool for the wasted energy and time and laughed at him over how seriously he took the art of blood magic.

There was no woman in the room that laughed at him now. The uneducated heathens that lived in the land beyond the wall—the ones that were raised in this unholy place—were _afraid_ of power. They could feel it humming with life and it left them cold when it should have inspired them with faith. 

“This,” Claudia said, “is a blood mage. The last living relic of the time when the Gods still lived with us. The High Priests want us to worship a fiery goddess when there is still living proof that our Gods were far more unforgiving. This is the last true believer that we will probably ever see.”

Malik shook out the shirt and pulled it back over his head. He fixed the excessive billow of it with the sash at his waist and sat back down. He did not feel like a true believer as he stabbed at the unfamiliar food he was offered. There was no piety left in him or he would not have left his home to track his brother halfway across the world. 

“He will not hurt us,” Claudia said with finality. “Will you stay long?”

Malik shook his head.

“Have you followed someone here?”

Yes. He did not even have to nod for her to know his answer. Claudia let out a soft sound and looked at one of the women as if she would provide an answer to the unspoken question before she cleared her throat, “was it a child?”

No. Kadar had liked to think he had not reached adulthood but he was no child. He might not have gone quietly as they dragged him out of the trees toward his inevitable fate. His brother had no interest in magic but he knew as well as anyone the consequences of being caught. If he couldn’t wreck awful vengeance for the insult of being collared like an animal, he would have incited his captors to rage just to escape imprisonment through death. 

“The Enforcers have stopped allowing adult slaves through the port. They are taken to the flame immediately. Only children are accepted.” The words were so softly spoken they were barely spoken at all. There was an implied apology in them. Claudia did not try to touch him but watched his face attentively.

If Malik could have spoken her language, he would have told her that he _had_ to know. Rather than attempt it, he turned his attention solely to eating and trusted her to figure it out. 

\--

It was not a surprise that he was called to the Secretary’s office. Robert De Sable was less interested in the justice that his position demanded and far more interested in securing the continuing good opinion of men with more money than sense. He was never sitting when Altair was summoned to him, always standing with his back to the door where the light of the day would highlight the width of his shoulders and the magnificence of his unusual height. The robes of his station did a poor job hiding the bulk of his arms but stretched awkwardly across the overgrowth of unused muscles that bunched at his shoulders. 

Altair was not incapable of fear, he was not immune to intimidation tactics but he remained unimpressed by Robert’s attempts to cow him. Like so many of the other rich-white-sons of the city, he had whispered his wish for wealth, health and prosperity into the fetid air of the Goddess’ flame and it had been granted. “You called,” Altair said. He kept his hands behind his back where the pressure-whiteness of his knuckles would not give away his displeasure at being beckoned.

“Yes,” Robert De Sable said. He turned then, and smiled without charm. His hands spread and his words (thick with the accent of his childhood spent reforming the northern cities) were deep and slow. “You bring me trouble, boy.” He took a step forward and Altair kept his place. “Always trouble,” and another step put him close enough the perfume sprinkled on his clothes was a noxious fog. One of his hands (larger by far than any other man that Altair had ever met) lifted up to tug at his clothes like the wrinkles on them offended him. “Certainly more trouble than you are _worth_.” The smile slid off his face while he toyed with the ties that secured Altair’s clothes. The pause while he let the word sit and fester was unpleasant and _damp_. The implication in his half closed eyes a barely understandable confusion of contempt and interest. 

“Time will prove my worth,” Altair said when he could tolerate the silence no longer.

Robert pressed the full flat of his hand against Altair’s chest. The softness of his expression burnt solid and sharp around the edges as he smiled. “Not,” he said, “if you waste what little of my good will remains. Your position in our department is tenuous at best. You barbaric methods border on outright genocide. Our people,” and he stepped away from Altair as he said, “are comfortable with their beliefs and secure in the knowledge that our True Goddess will protect us from the wrath of these godless heathens.” He went around his desk. “Never,” he countered, “have you provided us any _proof_ that our slaves are even capable of the magic you fear so blindly.” He picked up a paper off the top of his desk, took a moment to look over it.

Altair clenched his teeth to keep from speaking. 

When Robert could bear the silence no longer, he laid the paper down on the desk again and looked (down) at him. “Do not insult the good will and the _welfare_ of the men that have _allowed_ you to retain such a prestigious position. They are far more important than you.” Then he waved his hand at Altair to send him on his way. “Go,” he said, “go and do something that cleans away your shame.”

There was _no part_ of Altair capable of tolerating the words, and no _part_ of him that could bear the insult of the words. But he nodded his head and bit out, “yes, sir,” before he turned and went out through the door. He contented himself with filthy-red daydreams of how he would turn De Sable inside out. 

\--

“And this,” Claudia had said to him when she gave him the last of his costume. The necessity to hide all the visible ley lines on his skin had seemed absurd to him in the quiet of the mid-morning whore house. She had put a hood on his head, gloves on his hands, boots on his feet and finally handed him a black robe that would cover the thin white sleeves of his shirt. Only after that had she nodded her head in approval. “Be quick, but discreet,” was her advice before she sent him on his way.

The whorehouse was set by the shore, not so far from the docks where the clientele was most plentiful. His impulse had been to go to the docks, to search through the vessels waiting there and the squat, fat warehouses that stood near them. There was too much danger there, as the slavers that had robbed the villages of his home worked to prepare their _goods_ for sale. The thought of his people chained like livestock sat in the pit of his gut like a fire. There was not much piety or belief left in Malik, but only enough to advise himself with caution. If he had to bear witness to such depraved acts of indifference against his people (so close on the heels of learning of his brother’s most certain death) he would have slaughtered every man close enough to catch.

Malik had walked away from the docks, along the dusty road that led him into the city. There were no homes like these in the land he had come from, not buildings made out of stone or brick that rose like monsters into the sky, blocking away the sun from the streets. There was no gathering of people large enough to equal the soggy heat of the bazaar. The _crush_ of noise that came from the compacted shout of so many strangers was deafening. He stood only at the edge of it, peering down the wide street overwhelmed with shops and carts. There were merchants and beggars, there were men in stately clothes and women in fine-long-dresses, fanning themselves against the oppressive heat of the city. 

He stood not so far from a cart that sold charms. Each of the little golden bangles that could be added to jewelry or sewn into a pocket. Malik did not touch them (as foul as they were with corrupted magic) but look at the beaten-flat surface of them. The runes and symbols that had been etched into their unpolished faces were incomplete spells and gibberish he thought he could almost understand. The man that shouted from behind the cart spoke too quickly for Malik to make sense of his words but the few he caught did not match the offers he made.

A ‘luck’ charm that only said ‘tree.’ There were spells in his land that spoke of luck and trees but none of them that would helped these poor, witless strangers.

He crept inward, found a crowd that was forgiving and ignorant of his addition. They moved together, a mass of bodies twisting and singing laughter back and forth. They stopped to admire a rug, and again to buy sweets from a little cart that smelled too strongly of burnt syrup to stand. 

Malik found a safe pocket in the bazaar to stand in, sank himself in a convenient shadow where a small bench seemed to invite perfect strangers to take a reprieve from the endless walk of merchants. He sat and watched, thought varied and unkind things about these strangers. Many of them whiter than he might have imagined any person could be. A good deal of the women with hair bleached out white (on purpose, he could only guess) as a momentary tribute to the ‘one True Goddess’ so they said. The men were different, they came in skins of all colors (except his own, of course). They were treated as fairly as the money they offered by the greedy merchants begging to sell their wares.

When Malik grew tired of the noise, he got up and finished the walk through the bazaar, up and up away from the noise.

He came to what, in this city, must have been a Temple: a massive white-stone building that rose higher than the houses around it. It was an inspiring sight with windows full of colored glass and doors as high as Malik might have been if he were three of himself standing each one on the other’s shoulders. The steps glittered in the sun, the peaks of the high roof were so high the sun obscured them when he tried to look. 

Malik only just took a step toward the open door when he heard the crack of a strap across skin. There was a pitiful wail of repentance that followed it. The whimpered appeal for forgiveness spoken in broken words. He followed the sound of it, around the glitter front of the Temple, to an alley that stood as wide as a street between this church and the next. There, he found a small grouping of little mage girls: each of them clutching filthy black rags, dripping soot-darkened-water as they cowered away from the upheld strap of the man who was shouting at them.

They were _naked_ from the waist up, kept bare to the sun and the cruel whips of the strap. They were little, yes, but they were not _young_. He could see the scars across their shoulders and arms, the still-red-wheals of fresh wounds. The man with the strap pointed at the wall and shouted at the girls. They went, scuttling across the ground on their raw knees and fingertips. 

The man looked over his shoulder at Malik, rested the strap across his shoulder and wiped a drop of a sweat from his face with the ruddy back of his hand. “If you like what you see, a price can be arranged,” and the words made every one of the girls turn to look at him (an obscured shape by the cloak and hood) with a new sort of resigned fear. “If not,” the man continued as he extended the strap toward him, “ _move on_.”

Malik’s hands were tight enough that without the leather grip of the gloves covering his palms, his nails most certainly would have dug into the shallow violet grooves in his palm. His mind was a racing cycle of curses for things as _foul_ as this wretched man. They were filling up his throat until his shoulders were vibrating with the need to eject them and yet he dug his teeth in tight against themselves. Rather than stay to bear witness to these girls’ fear, he turned away.

He walked down the street of fine houses, where mage women in plain dresses were tending white children in the yards, where mage men were attending flower beds and broken shutters. Every miserable face he saw was blank: either robbed of the promise of their God or kept neutral after years of abuse and neglect. 

Malik walked until his legs were sore of it, until he had finally navigated his way through the neighborhoods (past hordes of lazy citizen boys, whistling admiration at the half-naked girls that worked in the city) to where the acid smell of burning flesh was slow black snow from the sky above them. 

Never before, not once in the whole of his life, had he felt as insignificant and _tiny_ as he did standing before the Eternal Flame of Aminali. The flame that surpassed even the top of the great stadium built to contain it. The rim of the monumental bowl rose like a mountain cliff and the heat of the flame was _broiling_ across his face. He was soaked in sweat in a matter of seconds, the wind that blew away from the bowl was strong enough to knock back the hood he’d kept on. It was foolishness to leave his face uncovered but he couldn’t _think_ when faced with the reality of the fire.

(He thought, somewhere set in the center of his chest, this was where his brother had died.)

Malik looked down at his hands, well hidden under the black leather gloves, and then back toward the streets he had taken to get here. He reached up to slide the hood back over his head and turned away from the flame. It snapped-and-burst behind him. 

He took a direct path, across side streets until he found the street of temples again. His memory of the place was incomplete, and he walked with cautious steps until he found the great white temple where the girls were still scrubbing the walls clean of the soot. The overseer (a viciously ugly man) was leering at them with a bland sort of hunger, a dull lust that spoke to how many times he had been sent to observe them.

Malik pulled his gloves off. His fingernails were sharp and quick, cutting into the flesh of his palm in pinprick points that rose blood to the surface in little red pearls. The lines that ran up his palms, across his wrists, twisted at his elbows and cut across the underside of his upper arm hummed-and-burnt. He walked to the man, who was lazy about looking at him, slow to recognize him by his clothes.

The man said, “change your mind then? Which one you want?” as he pointed at the girls who had slowed their scrubbing to a stop. 

Malik lifted his hand and pressed his palm across the man’s mouth, spread his blood across the man’s lips so that he would lick it off again. He only said, “ _rot_.” It was the most concise and useful curse he had learned. It would spread through the man’s body on the inside, turning ever part putrid, swollen and then liquid. When he died, it would be one long wail of a drowning man, gasping for breath as pus and blood filled him from the bottom to top. 

The man shoved him back, lapped at his lips without though and then wiped at his mouth with his dirty palm. Curses were powerful _strange_ magic, the sort of thing that were cautioned against in his home. They created a bond between them—this foul man and Malik—that would keep until the man died. His immediate fear was an offensive chill on Malik’s neck as he stared at him with open wonder. 

Malik looked toward the girls, the oldest (but not tallest) of them straightened up and she said (in the language of his home), “have you come to be the reckoning we have prayed for? Has our God not abandoned us?”

The man’s face was caught up in a peculiar stare, the animal-awareness of his impending death. He pointed at Malik with a dirty finger, “what are you?” he asked, “what are you?”

“I am the fury of my people,” Malik said. “I am the absolution that was promised them. You will be _sorry_ for what you have brought.” Not a word of his language made sense to the man and he looked at the girls who were startled out of staring as if he expected they would translate it for him. 

Rather, the girl said, “when they brought me here I was frightened. Now I am old. Spare the children they sell at the slave market. Do for them what our Fathers would have done for us.” Then she motioned at the other girls to pick up their rags and continue to scrub the wall.

Malik spared only one more glance for the overseer, watched him rub the center of his chest with a curious thumb and then smiled to himself and he turned away. He made it a safe distance before panic-and-fear drove the man to begin screaming. His wretched wailing made the temple doors burst open and a wealth of men in white robes came running out in alarm. Malik did not stay to watch the chaos but plotted a path that took him back to the whorehouse and the dubious safety it offered him (for now).

\--

It was late afternoon before Altair was released from the unfortunate business of attending the crowds in the lobby of the justice building. Managing the minor affairs of the greater public was the worst sort of torture he would willingly inflict upon himself. It suited Robert just fine as punishment, if only because he knew how Altair detested the casual touch of so many strangers. Worse than that, the filthy lingering of their eyes on him, the way they stared in calculations: daydreaming lewd thoughts or dissecting the exact hue of his skin to guess at his parentage. 

He was freed from the horror of trying to sort out a dispute over stolen cakes by the arrival of a page from one of the holy temples. While it was customary to enter the justice building with a sense of decorum, this boy broke through the doors and shoved through the crowd with pointed elbows and hurried excuses. He was saying, “it’s emergency, it’s an emergency,” as he wormed his way through the bodies waiting in line. Altair watched him pause a moment, hands in his hair, a strange spotted redness of hysteria on his pale cheeks. The page must have seen him at the precise moment Altair raised his hand to the feuding merchants to stall their endless complaints.

The boy shouted, “you!” so senselessly his fear for his life must have erased all good manners from his brain. He dashed across the floor and held his hands out toward Altair, “the priests of the Sun Temple have sent me to find you; they say you can tell them what was done. They say you must come at once.”

Altair excused himself (as politely as he felt necessary) and followed the boy back out through the crowds. They hurried in the streets until they came to a clot of bodies, pressed tight together and gaping inward toward the open doors of the temple. Even at such a great distance, Altair could hear the familiar intractable shrieking of the condemned. He let out a soft sigh at the sound of it. “You should not come closer,” Altair said, “stay back.”

The crowd broke apart to allow him through, each man eying him and his uniform with some sense of relief from the slow-growing hysteria that was going unanswered by the priests. As he got close enough to the stairs, he could hear the prayers of the righteous divine, the calls of those holy men beseeching the One True Goddess and all her brothers and sisters to spare the life of the condemned. Altair did not pause as he stepped across the threshold of the Temple but a shiver ran down his spine when he passed between the light of the outdoors to the cool shadows of the interior. He walked up the aisle to toward the altar at the head of the temple. Typically, stacked with offerings to their benevolent Gods, the altar had been cleared of everything to make space to lay the poor dying man. 

He was an overseer by the clothes he wore and the usual smell of his body. His flailing limbs were turning purple-and-yellow, swelling up at his joints. There was bulging pockets pushing out from his ribs as his gut filled up and stood out under his clothes. His feet were grotesque balloons fit to burst at any moment and cover the shocked-white-faces of these holy men. 

Altair came to a pause at the steps of the dais and waited for them to see him. While he waited, he looked to the side, to the four little cleaning girls. They were hardly girls anymore, each of them with breasts and bent backs, stone-faced against the evil working of the curse. There were two sorts of slaves—as far as Altair had ever been able to make out—the ones that cowered in the face of great power, that were terrified of the inevitability of their deaths; and the ones like these girls. The ones that had been born in some other place, who had learned curses from the mouths of their Mothers. These girls were not afraid of death but filled with cold certainty at what must be done.

“Your work?” he asked. He motioned at the man, at the red-foaming spittle boiling out of his face as he choked out screams for mercy. He took a step toward them and the oldest girl moved to cover the others with her body. She had no marks, no spells, no power that was visible on her skin. There was no special energy that made her eyes bright. 

“He sold us to men on the street. We could stand the insult no longer,” the girl said.

Altair smirked at that. “I’m sure,” he said.

“Altair!” the priest called at last, “what can be done?” He was shivering with uselessness, covered in the bubbles of blood and puss that was breaking through the man’s flesh as his body swelled beyond his skin’s ability to hold it. 

Altair said, “if you have a knife, put him out of his misery. If you do not, there is nothing to be done. He is cursed and the Gods have not seen fit to save him.” He motioned at the girls. “I am taking these… _criminals_.”

The Priest stared at the girls in a new light. “How dare you!” he shouted at them. “How dare you repay our kindness in this way! How dare you!” He charged forward and began slapping the girls. He gripped them by the short hair they’d been allowed to grow and beat his fist against the sides of the girls faces one-and-another. His words grew high and nonsensical as he voiced his displeasure at being betrayed.

Altair did not intervene. The oldest girl shoved the old man back. She screamed at him with blood on her teeth and bruises on her face. “What _kindness_ ,” she screamed at him. “What _care_ have you ever shown us? You are _foul_ , _ugly_ men! You are a _disgrace_ to the Goddess you pray to! There will be no _mercy_ for you! All evil,” she shouted as she wiped her hand across her mouth and flicked her fingers to spray her blood across the priest’s face, “ _must be answered_ for!” And there was the light in her face, the true power of her people. She pulled herself up straight and she looked at Altair, not the priest, when she said, “I have seen your reckoning. You will _burn_.”

“After you,” he said. He sent pages to fetch the nearest Enforcers and they paraded the young murderers through the crowd as the screams of the cursed man cut through the air. His begging was a pitiful, mindless cry for forgiveness that could not be given. Altair though, as he pulled the oldest (bravest) girl along behind him, that whoever had truly done this could not be very far away. He looked at the crowd, here and there, trying to pick out who it might have been. He saw nothing but the same bland faces of fear and it _bored_ him.

\--

Malik had returned to the whorehouse in time to secure a small meal before he was sent upstairs. Inside the small room Claudia offered him, he stripped off the many layers of his clothing until he wore only the pants. The ley lines that ran from his palm to his heart were _burning_ with energy as the curse worked. The man’s animal fear was a constant cold stain down his spine. 

Mages had been gifted with immense knowledge: every form of magic the Gods had ever shared was born in the depth of their forest. They were the last living scholars of the Gods, the children of men and women who had once sat at the feet of the benevolent and learned magic from the lips of the divine. But they were no longer governed by knowledge, law or moral but by the promise of their most sacred God. 

_Be still_ , their God commanded, _be brave enough to tolerate all evil and know that every crime must be answered for. Protect the world with passivity and every life you live beyond death will be blessed._

There were few wise men in the forest of Malik’s youth. The theological leaders were safe in high towers, far from the borderlands where their people were kidnapped, raped and murdered in the name of protecting a world that had no care for them. But Malik had been raised repeating the words, “ _be still_ ” like a mantra against the mounting anger that could not be contained. Every man and every woman that had lived in the trees of his village had been soured by the belief in the divine, kept from violence and vengeance by the promise of an infinite life of happiness beyond this one.

Malik rubbed at the split skin of his palm as the curse turned his skin black around the wounds. Blood mages were ferocious things, left over from the time before when their people were proud and vicious warriors capable of wreaking their awful vengeance on the world. He could not move himself to peace _now_. He could not _still_ his anger.

The door of his small room opened and Claudia stepped inside. Her red dress was unchanged from the night before, her breasts were pushed up to seem inviting to men like that foul thing that leered at the mage girls and offered them for cash. She closed the door very quietly behind her. “I heard a rumor in my parlor, a man is dying in the Sun Temple. I heard it’s a terrible sight.” She motioned at his hand and Malik shrugged as he straightened from how he had been leaning forward where he sat on the edge of the bed. She took his hand and ran her thumb across the black cloud beneath his skin. When she pressed on it, it oozed toward the wound inky-and-black and retreated inside of his skin again. 

“Our clients are few tonight. The small minded men of the city are hiding in the temples tonight.” She ran her fingers up the shimmering line of energy toward his elbow. Her hand was arm and sure when she touched him, the fine touch of a woman well practiced in getting what she wanted. “they took two of my brothers. They took my Father.”

Malik stood up and Claudia’s hand pressed against the knot of ley lines over his heart. Her touch was cool against the heat there and she gasped like it shocked her. If he could have spoken her language he might have asked what she meant to do, what she hoped to gain from touching him so intimately. (Or he might not have.)

“I do not know what the man did to earn his fate. There are many crimes in our city that have gone unanswered for. If there are still Gods in our world, I pray they have sent you to us.”

Malik caught her hand before her fingers could go any lower on his belly. She was not ashamed or even concerned with the boldness of her touch. He thought he should have told her that he wasn’t interested (because he wasn’t), but she interrupted him.

“Does it hurt you?” Claudia asked. She did not wait for an answer from him but pull him down with one hand around his neck and press her mouth to his. It was a plain enough offer. One that even a man as utterly foolish as he now was would have been ridiculous to turn down. He circled his arms around her and pulled her down on the bed with him.

\--

The men that staffed the barracks at night were dim-witted, cruel lot. They were chosen for their temperament and their loyalty to the Goddess. Each of them was interested only in securing the quantity of the sacrifices necessary to appease the One True Goddess and the paycheck they drew for their service. It did not matter to them, therefore, if Altair wanted to go to the deepest part of the prison. They did not ask him questions but catcall at his back with brief, sadistic well wishes.

While there were many men among the Enforcers that found a wealth of available lovers in the condemned, Altair had neither the taste nor the interest in such carnal distractions. He walked down the sloping hallways, guided only by the flicker of firelight at the end of his torch, stepping over pebbles and bugs as he went. The begging for mercy was quiet at night, the raving of the mad was silenced by sleep. 

The last small room at the end of the hall had two locks—one of the guards that dragged the prisoners out now and again for bathing, and one that Altair had installed himself. Despite the infrequent use, the locks turned smoothly. He stepped into the dreary, suffocating blackness of the room and drew a breath through his mouth so the foul smell of the cell would not turn his stomach. He paused in the doorway only long enough to light the larger torch and then pulled the door shut behind him. 

“Are you sleeping?” he asked. There was a single table and a single chair in the room. He dusted the filthy surface of the table with one long sleeve and set the package he had carried on top of it. “I brought your favorites,” he said.

The heap of soiled blankets in the corner moved sluggishly. The body beneath them uncurled, stretched out so its dirt-blackened feet were bare. It struggled against the weight of the blankets, or the brightness of the seldom seen light, as it rolled half onto its back. The man’s face was covered in hair (and ticks, perhaps, and fleas almost certainly). The length of it grown out in knotted, oily tangles all around his head. The man sat a moment, with one hand held up against the intolerable brightness of the fire. His mouth opened and closed and opened again—a garish black hole that emitted the foulest of odors—as he blinked his eyes to try to regain his sight. 

“Come,” Altair said again. He untied the napkin at the top of the package and spread it out. He’d brought cheese and meat and fruits, all the sorts of food that were not afforded to future sacrifices. He motioned at the generous meal.

The thing, deformed from too many years spent in the cell not tall enough to hold him, turned away from the offering. His mouth drew down in a frown so certain that someone might have believed he would not give (this time). 

“How many years has it been now?” Altair asked. “Four? Five?”

And the man laughed at him. The sound of a wild animal running in circles just before he bolted forward on the broad-flat-bottoms of his feet. His fingers were blunt but his nails were grown long and curled at the edges and he pulled the food toward him with eager-sloppy motions. “Ten,” he said.

“Has it been?” Altair said. He dusted a bug away from his knee and let out a soft noise. “How many more years?”

The man laughed again. He squeezed a grape between his finger and palm until it exploded (no so unlike that overseer in the Sun Temple had in the end, though it took the man far less time to clean the grape than it would take the priests to clean the bits of that man off their ceilings). “What do you want?” he asked. “You always come with questions.”

“Yes, I guess I do,” Altair said. He was not without pity for the pitiful. Men who had the means and the power to escape their situations were the sort of men he had no patience for. Men that had power and means beyond that of all others evoked nothing but the bitterest of displeasure from him. But men like this, filthy and trapped with no hope of escape, he could spare pity for them. “You have been useful to me,” he said. 

“Questions,” the man repeated.

“Can mages cast curses without the use of ley lines?”

The man laughed again, tore a piece of cheese in half with the long curls of his fingernails and pushed half of it into his mouth. It bulged out under his wrinkled cheek and bobbed up and down as he talked. “You do not _cast_ curses. Curses aren’t spells. Curses are _curses_. You have to get your hands _dirty_. You have to put your hands and your blood on them. You have to give up part of your soul to make curses. Little parts,” the man said, “for little curses. Big parts for big curses. You can’t cast,” he laughed at the word again.

“Forgive me,” Altair said. “Can it be done without ley lines? Can it be done by a little girl?”

That made the man pause. He looked up at Altair with his face wrinkled in contempt. There was unanswered rage in the skeleton set of his shoulders. He said, “have you been killing little girls?”

“I had the understanding your people thought of death as the ultimate expression of your faith. I prefer to think of it as—fulfilling the promise your God has made you. They are already in a better place.” As far as Altair was concerned, they would never escape the fiery hell of the sacred flame. It was a bit of mythology that seemed most likely, a bit that stuck under his skin and scared him.

“No,” the man said at last, “no. Little girls cannot make curses. _Blood mages_ can make curses. Do you have another blood mage, Altair? Has the cry of our people finally been heard?” His mouth drew up in a smile full of rotting teeth. For a moment, the man was content to grin at him, to take pleasure in the unlikely fate he thought must await Altair. Then his head tipped and his eyes (round and dark) narrowed at him. “All evil must be answered for,” he said with _awe_. 

“So I have heard,” Altair said. He made to stand as the man tipped his head and laughed at him. Chunks of fruit and cheese were caught in the hair around his mouth, the skin of his face was covered in a layer of dirt so thick it cracked and peeled. But he _laughed_. Altair paused a moment until the hysteria passed. “How many more days before you forget your name? How many before you forget all words? You have no reason to laugh here, no reason to think your God has heard you. I have buried you in fire. _Nothing_ can find you here.”

“Abbas,” the man spit at him. “I am Abbas.” He shouted it at him as Altair took away the fire, and shouted it as he closed the door, screamed it like a howl that woke the whole of the corridor. And when they were all shrieking together, Abbas’ body hit the door at the end. 

His voice above all others, shouting, “ _all evil must be answered for._ ”

\--

Malik took a knife in the morning. 

The road between the whorehouse and the slave market was soggy. The mud stuck to the bottom of his boots as he walked. The sun that was swelling at the horizon was barely enough light to see by. He had heard talk of the market when he walked in the city the day before. They spoke of how early they would need to go to see the children before the start of the auction. 

Malik pulled the hood over his head when he was close enough to hear the sound of chains and the shouting of gruff men. The handle of the knife was hot and damp in his palm from how tightly he gripped it. The slave market was just over a swell of land. There was a flattened area set just in front of a wooden stage. Men were already standing around with their hands in their pockets, each one of them avoiding the other as if they were ashamed of their purpose. He had been afraid he would be the only man there with a hood but there were several that did not seem to want to show their faces.

There were no children yet but the sound of the chains moving that must have signaled the approach of them. Malik did not move from where he stood but the other men all stepped forward to form a line, each of them giving the other ample space and silence. He could not guess their purpose but the pinkness of their cheeks when they looked at the bare chested children they pulled from the warehouse. 

The largest man at the head of the slow train of children didn’t acknowledge the men but sneer at them as they passed. There were more children than Malik expected—he had expected a dozen (maybe) but the most he could imagine was twenty. It didn’t seem to him that he had ever seen so many children in a single place in the whole of his life. 

While he stood in shock (numb and sick with disgust), the men that had been waiting all stepped forward to inspect the children. Their large hands slid around the jaws of the little boys and plucked at the soft arms of the girls. They assessed the height and weight of the children as they circled around them. 

Malik waited until the other men were farther down the line of children. When he stepped up onto the small, dirty child (he could not tell if it were a boy or a girl) he reached out with his palm up. The child looked to the side (and not at him) with such determination that his eyes were watering. Malik said, “we have not forgotten you.”

Then the boy looked up at him, wide-opened eyes and gaping mouth. His voice was very small when he said, “have you come to set us free?”

The guards moved down the long line of children with the bulk of the men still feeling the children’s faces and staring into their eyes. Malik pulled the knife from his sleeve and used it to cut along the ley line that ran between his elbow and wrist. The blood came freely, slicked down into his palm and he said, “pass peacefully from this awful world, our God will keep his promise.” 

The boy dipped his fingertip into the blood and spread it on his tongue and then he took another finger and held it up to the kid next to him. On and one down the line they went, each child dipping their finger into the red of his blood. The ones that were hidden by the clutch of sweating men benefitted from the generosity of the others. When he could go no farther without arousing suspicion, the children spread their hands with his blood and passed it among themselves.

He retreated.

The children were not afraid of him, they were not afraid of the promise his curse was meant to fulfill. Each of them sucked the taste of his blood into their mouths and they looked back at the men with the quiet knowledge they would not be purchased today. 

The rising of the sun brought more men. The filled the space in front of the stage even as the guards and merchants. The anxious energy of the children, the joy of escape, filled Malik’s chest until it felt like a sunburst of fire just under his ribs. It grew-and-grew until it seemed impossible that the other men could not see light that felt as if it were trying to cut through his skin. 

The crowd of people had grown immense, had provided the cover of many bodies to keep him from standing out. The first child was taken from the chain and pulled to the top of the stage. The auctioneer cleared his throat and reached down to lift the plaque that labeled the child’s sex and age before straightening again. 

“First today is—”

The child’s mouth opened as if he meant to say something but he did not have the time to speak words before his body gave out under him. He fell to the stage in a heap, immediately after the clanking of the chains drew the startled attention of the crowd as another child fell. Their energy was bursting inside of his chest. 

The people of the city were screaming, the men with the keys to the chain were rushing forward to try to disentangle the last living children from the line of fallen ones. The man on the stage shouted, “get the Enforcers!”

Malik stayed to see the men in uniforms that rushed through the crowd. They stopped short at the sight of the children. Panic has spread through the crowd. The words were too fast and strange for Malik to make out. But he understood the _fear_. The fear was _glorious_.

\--

The first men at the slave market had called for doctors and priests before they called Altair. He walked into a scene of chaos, with the low-worrying twitter of voices repeating over-and-over again, “is it a plague?” as if that were the worst they could think of. The doctors had chosen two or three of the bodies to examine. They had them laid out across the stage as they hunched over them searching for signs of disease. 

The holy men were less curious; they looked down at the children slumped in heaps on the ground and motioned at the guards and pages turn them over to check for signs of unholy omens. 

Altair walked the line of them, just far enough to see the blood spread across the palms of the children. There were a few Enforcers that had spread along a line to keep back the frantic men that were impatient for official answers. They had detained a gathering of pedophiles as suspects (a laughable prospect that was) and were demanding answers about what they might have given the children that would kill them all.

For a moment, he thought about telling the Enforcers to quarantine the area. It would be a terrible spectacle. All the servants sent from the great houses would be kept from their work and there would be a lobby full of angry rich men protesting the waste. The odds of finding the blood mage that killed the children were low, and even lower if he tried to trap him. Altair didn’t call for the Enforcers to round up everyone. 

Rather, he went around the stairs and climbed to stand at the top of the stage. He looked at the crowd, at the cluster of people and how they were staring at him with sudden need. There were women in the mix now—certainly drawn by the spectacle. There were few women that ever attended slave auctions, even less now that it was only children that were sold. Altair did not look at the pulled tight groups of men and women, or at the eager faces of the suspects waiting for him to dismiss him. He looked at the edges. He watched the faces of the men who did not push closer to others, one after another until he found the man at the edge of the crowd.

The man wore a long black robe over his white clothes. There was a hood that hung at his shoulders. For a moment, he looked _directly_ at Altair with the same sort of wonder that Abbas had spared him. Then his eyes narrowed and then he raised his hand: the whole of his palm was coated red. There was no clear expression on his face (from such great distance) but the showing of his bloody hand was enough to make his intent known.

_I am the one_ he said without speaking. 

Altair looked down at the doctor crouching by the body of the dead child. “Leave it,” he said, “this is the work of blood magic. Look at his fingernail, look at his mouth. They were killed by a curse.” He said it loud enough the eager ears of the men in the front could hear it. They carried the news away, spread it through the city like the plague they feared it had been. 

The holy temples would be full of pious men that night. The Advent offices would have lines out the door as the rich men of the city bought sacrifices to be thrown into the flame as minor blessings and hopes for the safety of their family. 

When Altair looked out again, toward where the mage had stood he found an empty space. 

\--

By the time Malik returned to the whorehouse, the kitchen was filled with women nibbling on breakfast. The chatter they had been enjoying came to a quick halt when he came through the door. The whole of his body was slick with sweat, there was blood dripping off his loosely curled fist. The open wound on his arm was still bleeding freely and the blood loss was making his head spin. 

Claudia rose from where she was dividing the night’s profits. The other women recoiled in fear but Claudia caught him by the arms as his feet threatened to give out under him. She pulled him to a seat and held him as he dropped into it. “What?” she asked, “what can we do?”

Blood magic was full of rules that fell over and over on top of each other. The laws and commands of the God that had given them the power were full of contradictions. Curses were only _black_ and _evil_ if they were forced and not given. The children that died had not been afraid, they had welcomed the reprieve from the torment of the life that lay before them. Even now, if the God’s promise were true, they were being reborn into better lives. Curses festered and grew clots and great scabs that had to be cut or burnt. 

Malik pulled his sleeve up and it squeezed blood between his fingers as he rolled the cloth. He had found a stash of herbs in the kitchen before he’d gone (and thought then, as he thought now, how he should have laid them out on the table). Instead of having them close at hand he had to point at the jars sitting on the shelves. 

“What?” Claudia said.

Malik could name her what they were called where he was from (or what they smelled like) but he didn’t know the _words_ for them here. He pointed and slapped his hand on the table and pointed again. Claudia jumped at the sharp sound and one of the girls screamed. But one of them grabbed the jars and set them all out on the table. His blood was making puddles in the grooves of the wood, spreading toward the edges as it ran and ran from the glistening ley line. 

Death spells were indiscriminate about who they killed. Curses were precise, targeted torture that made stains on the soul of the dying. 

He grabbed the jar with the long leaves in it and Claudia pulled the lid open and held them out for him. He stuffed them in his mouth to chew them and pointed at a little jar of black seeds. One of the other women opened it and held it toward him but the smell of it was wrong so he pushed it away. 

“Water,” he said, “water.” One of the few words he had learned to speak clearly. Claudia brought it to him in a glass and he brought it to his mouth to mumble the sacred words of their God into the rim of it. When he finished he spit the chewed leaves into the water and then poured it across his arm.

He caught the little bits that floated and pushed them down into the wound. The pain was _immense_ and he grit his teeth against it. There were no familiar words left in his ears as Claudia put her hand on him and nagged at him. He made a motion of cloth wrapping around his arm and she nodded her head and sent her girls to fetch it. But his vision was going dim as the pain centered on the burn of blessed water boiling his blood. It covered the table in rapid bubbles and filled up his veins with fire. 

He woke up on the floor, covered in a sheet with his left arm wrapped so tightly in bandages his fingertips were tingling from lack of blood. When he looked over toward the soft sound of life, he saw Claudia sitting there keeping watch over him. 

“They’ve shut down the import of new slaves. They’ve killed everyone on the boats, they did not even bring them to the shore to burn them. If you look out now, you’ll see the ship are on fire. There is not much in this city that will keep a condemned man from the Gods’ Eternal Flame. They are _scared_.”

Malik sat up and the sheet fell down his chest. His shirt and his robe were gone. The blood that should have covered his chest had been washed away and his left arm was bandaged precisely. The wound no longer ached and the ley line that he’d cut into was no longer glistening. He sat with his legs crossed in front of him and watched her stare at him. 

Then she stood up. “You should eat. You look pale.” Then she busied herself with preparing him a meal while he worked to pull himself off the floor. 

He went to the doorway, not out onto the large porch that circled the building, but just close enough to see out into the harbor where great fires were blazing in the dim evening. Perhaps he thought he would whisper a prayer for the dead, but the brightness of the flames reminded him of the man. The one that had stood on the stage, the one that had looked for him in the crowd. That man in the uniform of the city guards.

There were curses of all kinds in the world Malik had come from. Direct curses and slow curses, death curses and luck curses— He had never seen (not once before) the iridescent glimmer of a curse that covered the man on the stage. It was not one that would kill him or even hurt him. It was only meant to mark him so that all the children of the Mages would know when they saw him: this man was an enemy.

Malik had learned of it, as all the children in the border villages had, those final words they were meant to speak before they died. The ones that laid a glimmer on the men who killed them. _All evil must be answered for_ , the promise of their Gods. The belief (but there was no proof) was that the curse would grow with every uttering of the words. Those that stood against the Mages would be struck down by the Gods. 

Malik thought of that man when he watched the boats burn. (He thought of the curses he had learned at the feet of the old women; he thought of the children that had died.) 

\--

Altair’s office afforded him an excellent view of the street. He had taken to watching the men in the streets whenever something _upsetting_ happened. Their worry and fear did not amuse him (exactly) but it did entertain him. The street was full of bodies begging entrance to the Temples. The priests and high priests were overwhelmed with the sudden influx on a Fourth day. 

His office did not provide him a window to look out at the harbor but he imagined the boats were still smoldering as they sank. The order to liquidate the remaining stock brought by eager slavers had not be difficult to secure in the wake of the sad events of the morning. Finding a man with enough loyalty to carry it out had been a more difficult task. 

Robert had shown up only long enough to say, “if you expect your order to be followed, you will have to go and start the fire yourself.” Then he stared at him the way the other men often did, as if Robert could not settle in himself if Altair were admirable for his devotion or disgusting with his flagrant disregard for human life.

Out on the shore, in front of an assembly of shocked-dumb men and surly merchants complaining about how long it had taken them to gather their stock, Altair shot the arrows that lit the boats on fire. He stood only long enough to be sure the fire caught and then passed the bow back to the man that had been too much a coward to do it. As he went around the crowd, he saw men who had sworn loyalty to their city with tears in their eyes even before the screaming of the trapped mages grew loud enough to hear it from the shore. 

“If they escape, shoot them,” Altair said to the Captain that was staying behind. Then he returned to his office.

Altair did not take _pleasure_ in death. It was now and always had been a means to an end. Mages did not belong in the Great White City, not as guests or slaves or insolent interlopers. The citizens of the city were fat on the belief they were better than all others but the events of the past day had proven they were flimsy, incompetent things. 

One blood mage had incited a panic that sent the weak-minded flocking to the Priests for assurance their Gods had not abandoned them. Sacrifices were ordered at such volumes, the barracks would be reduced to half their population just to accommodate it. One man had more power than all the Temples but, still, the simpering fools in the streets could not grasp their own insignificance.

He did not want to think of the blood mage with any tone of respect. (But there was respect in his mind, the acknowledgement of real power that must be paid to predators. The man would not be his _reckoning_ as the girl child told him, but he was, at very least, a worthwhile interruption.) He did not wish to think of the blood mage at all. A certain level of strategy would have to be employed to discover the identity of the man and care would have to be taken in the apprehension of him. Those were thoughts for a different time and a different place.

“Go,” Robert ordered from the doorway. He had come along so quietly Altair was startled by the sound of his voice. “I imagine you have some manner of celebrating your victories. This was a good day for you, wasn’t it?”

Altair turned to look at him. “This was a good day for no man. Regardless of my beliefs, regardless of the necessity of their deaths, not even I am crude enough to _celebrate_ the senselessness of such violence.” He did not lift his eyebrows as a challenge or raise his voice. He spoke tonelessly, as quietly as he could while being loud enough to be heard. 

Robert did not seem convinced of his words. He stepped into Altair’s office. “So you feel no vindication at knowing your paranoia is now shared?” The long strides he employed brought him close enough to catch the rich-man-smell of his perfume. He looked down at Altair with that same damp intensity. “There must be some _satisfaction_ in that.”

“I will be satisfied when I find the blood mage,” Altair said.

“As will everyone. I imagine there will have to be an auction for the rights to his sacrifice.” Robert seemed _amused_ by the thought of it. All the men of the city clamoring to be the one that bought the blood mage’s death, to be the one that delivered the murderer to the fire for the favor of their Goddess. “Of course,” Robert said as he ran his thumb across the insignia of the Enforcers on Altair’s collarbone. If his finger slipped upward and ghosted across his throat, Robert made it seem like an accident. “It could be arranged that after your years of loyal service, if you were to find him first, he could be yours.”

Altair did not step away but every inch of his skin crawled with the idea that he _wanted_ to. Rather, he nodded his head to acknowledge that he’d heard.

Robert put a hand on his arm and squeezed through his sleeve (like a butcher testing the meat he meant to carve), “as a reward. One that you could use to turn the course of your life. I imagine the Goddess is grateful to have you as a servant, this final show of loyalty to her would cause her to smile on you.” Robert smiled at him again and let his hand fall away. “It could be arranged.” But the stare lingered on him a moment too long. Robert made a brief sound of regret (or want) and then turned toward the door. “I must be seen at Temple. Perhaps you should show your face as well. It would help the poor opinion so many have of you. Even the whores are praying, Altair.”

He nodded again but did not move. He kept his place, and his hands in fists until Robert had gone. When he was sure that he was _alone_ he let out a breath that deflated his chest. The cold sweat that covered his back and palms made him shiver (in disgust) and he found himself striding to the desk to find the cold-silver knife. He held it in his hand while he thought-and-thought-and-thought of the many varied ways he would _tear_ Robert to pieces. 

\--

Long after the women had gone to sleep, but well before the sun rising over the horizon, Malik walked to the shore. There was a _reckless_ , restless feeling in his gut that filled his head with the certainty that he would be as safe shirtless as he would have been covered head to foot. He walked down the slope of land, out toward the water that was ashy-and-black, stepped into the mud that pulled at the soles of his boots. 

He stood at the edge of the unsacred grave of so many of his people and thought (for the first time since he had left his home) he may have been wrong to come so far. It was the will of the God who taught them that they remain, that they be still and always obedient. He had defied that holy order and it brought him here. 

Anger-and- _hate_ were black stains that grew and grew inside of men. Anger-and- _hate_ had brought them to this end. 

Malik crouched by the water, held out his fingers so the ashes still caught in the waves rolled between his fingers. When he was a child, a very young child, he had travelled with his Mother for days to the temple of the nearest wise men to see a funeral. The dead were wrapped and laid out across a pyre built over a sacred pit. Their ashes and bones would be made into magic that the wise men used to heal the earth. He had listened to the songs of his people, thanking the dead for loyalty and service. He had been filled with _fear_ of something he could not understand then.

The border villages where he had grown up were full of death. Their dead lay in shallow pits before they were burned (all at once) and their ashes were spread in the trees and out in the wind where they would be free of the life they had lived. 

Malik could not free his people in this awful city. He could not pull the ashes of the dead from the water. So he ran his fingers through it and he sang the low song of the wise men that made his body shiver with _fear_. 

“You shouldn’t waste your time with them.” The voice was close but not immediate. The man—the one from the stage—was standing a safe distance from him. His arms were behind his back and the long dark robes of his station where hanging loosely from his shoulders. Even in the blackness of the night, his skin was covered in the glimmer of the curse that had been uttered at him. “They’ve already gone.”

Malik stood up. 

The man did not move closer. He did not appear to be one of many, but stood alone far from the dim lights of the city. The others that had seen him shirtless had been confused or afraid but this man eyed the ley lines that began to glow in preparation of a curse Malik could not put voice to. (But he thought it, insistently, and how very much he would like to use it.) No, the man only smiled at him. “I was given to understand Blood Mages were always women.”

Usually women, but not always.

“Of course, I do not mean to be presumptuous, you might not have a penis.” Then he smirked at the words as if they amused him. “I did not expect to find you here. There are so many children in the city still waiting to die.” He looked back toward the city, over toward the orange tips of the flame crawling above the edge of the bowl. Even at so great a distance the eternal flame was clearly visible. 

Malik took a step toward the man while he was looking away, expecting that he would not notice (immediately) or react with any speed. But the man pulled a knife and held it out between them as soon as Malik made to step forward. Fear did not stall his feet, fear did not caution the sudden completeness of his anger. Malik screamed at the man as he ran forward.

But the man looked bored with him when he stepped into the attack. He was _resigned_ with a long sigh as he caught Malik’s left wrist in his hand. He was quick-footed and sure about twisting Malik’s arm behind his back. The pain at having his arm so crudely wrenched behind his back was miniscule in comparison to the precise slice of the blade cutting through three of the ley lines just above his elbow. The energy of them (still preparing for a curse) went suddenly and entirely cold. The shock made his body fold forward. 

Blood was hot on his arm but _inert_ , rendered utterly useless (but _by what_ ) even as the man’s arm came around his chest and the stained-red-edge of the knife pressed to his throat. The man’s chin dug into his shoulder as he pressed his body all along Malik’s back. 

“I could take you in,” the man said, “I could put you in the fire myself. All I need to do is produce the man who incited panic in the city of the One True Goddess. They will hail me as their savior and they will forget they ever cared about the death of all those children.” He turned his head so that his breath was hot against Malik’s neck. “I did not come to find you,” he said, “so I will pretend that I have not.” Then he released Malik and shoved him forward.

Malik fell in the mud and when he had managed to scramble back to his feet and turn around, the man was gone. The darkness around them was so complete that it was impossible to make out where he’d gone. Malik looked down at his arm, at the long gray ley lines where the energy had been interrupted and ran his thumb across the shallow gash that had cut through them. They were dead, cold and useless to him in a way that no amount of healing or holy water could have fixed. He smeared the blood down his arm and peered into the inky blackness, searching for any sign of the man. 

\--

At home, stripped to the waist and standing in front of the washing stand, Altair looked at the blood caught around his fingernails and in between his fingers. He had cleaned the knife on the folds of his uniform. It lay next to the bowl while he stood with his hands poised over the water. His intention had been to wash it away, to spread the stain of the Blood Mage’s poisoned blood through the bowl until it was _pink_ and useless. 

Yet, he could not overcome the hesitation that left him holding his hands up. He thought of the Blood Mage crouching in the water, of how his fingers had spread in the water and the sound of his _singing_. It was a mournful thing, that tune, the words were too low to make out clearly but it was _familiar_. 

But he thought of the Blood Mage, with his skin illuminated by the glow of those ley lines that spread from his heart to the whole of his body, twisting and pulsing up and over his shoulders, down his arms, to his palms. Those lines disappeared beneath his pants and rose up his neck to the space behind his ears. There was a faint glow, deeper and pinker, that seemed to come from inside of him. The possibility of the _level_ of mastery buried ley lines required should have _terrified_ him. 

The Blood Mage was _hot_ everywhere Altair had touched him. The whole of his body seemed to be filled with _vital_ heat. Altair’s hands were still warm where they had touched him, his chest was still pink from the flush he had gotten being that close. The smell of him: sweat and dirt and wood was caught in his nose. 

But it was the blood on his hands, the dried-flat stains where he’d cut the Blood Mage that he could not push out of his mouth. This was the blood that had swelled the overseer until he split in shreds, died as he exploded (still screaming). This was the blood that had freed the children before they could be made into slaves. Altair thought it must taste like _righteousness_ the sort that had never been truly seen in the Great White City and he could hardly keep from running his tongue across it. 

There was no sense of the passing of time as he stared at the blood, but the water that he had heated was cold when he finally plunged his hands beneath the surface. He scrubbed the blood away until it turned the water pink and then poured it over his arms and his chest to scrub away the ghost of heat he couldn’t bear a moment longer.

\--

Claudia said, “what happened?” to him as if she thought he could answer her. When she traced the gray lines from the split open wound to his heart, the confidence that had sustained her faltered. “Can it be fixed?”

Malik shook his head. He had spent the remainder of the night searching through the herbs of the house to find something that might assist in healing the wound. He had made glass after glass of blessed water and it had done nothing. Whatever had made the wound held a magic far more impressive than Malik could manage. Claudia sat next to him, a dull weight at his side as looked out at the small room around them. He did not look at her face but down at his hands. “Man,” he said, and, “water.” He pointed toward the shore and Claudia followed the motion of his finger but did not immediately understand. “Man,” he said again. 

“There was a man?” she asked. He nodded and then stood and held his hand up just a fraction higher than his own head. She was watching him with open-eyes and a curious tilt of her head. “There are many men in our city,” she said.

So he pulled out the black robe and turned it so the back covered the whole of his chest. He motioned at himself, the length of the robe and how completely it covered him. Something like recognition showed in her face and then he pointed again at the water. “Man.”

“An Enforcer?” she said (as if it meant something to him). “No. They don’t wear the—did he have skin like mine?” she asked. “Did he have gold eyes?”

Malik had not taken the appropriate amount of time to gaze into the man’s eyes. He had taken only long enough to watch the glimmer on his skin. But he had seen him in sunlight the day before, and he nodded his head. The skin, at least, was very close to Claudia’s. 

“Altair,” she said and the name itself seemed to _scare_ her. “The Judge of Slave Affairs—Malik, that is _not_ a man. How did you escape him?” She was on her feet with her hands out to grab at him. The fear that had laced itself into each of her words was a vibration in the air. 

Malik stared at her as she clutched at his arms and his chest (like she couldn’t be certain he was whole). He did not know the words for, ‘he allowed me to escape’ and so he said nothing. Instead he shook the robe off again and threw it on the bed. There were many things that he wanted to say to her (to thank her, maybe) but there was nothing he could find the words to express. Instead, he cupped his hands around her face and kissed her forehead. 

Claudia’s eyes slid closed and the hand that was against his chest slid up to rest at his neck. It seemed there was more she wished to say but no words came.

\--

Altair did not rise quickly from his bed in the morning. He lay on his back and stared at the slivers of light that cut through the gapes in the curtains. They danced across the long wall like a magicians trick, playing picture games with themselves. It had been a long time since Altair considered himself a child (the better part of two decades, verging into a third) but he remembered the simple joy of laying in his bed and watching the lights of dawn dancing through the windows. 

His head was full of half-thought things, crowded with midnight plans he had not stayed awake long enough to complete. They came back to him now: the foolishness of letting the Blood Mage go, the bitter victory of watching the ley lines flicker and die. 

(The heat of the mage’s body, the smell of his outrage and the spread of his blood on Altair’s hands.)

There were many things that were _possible_ now that the city was gripped with an edge of panic. There were inflexible men who would listen to his words when they were badgered by the worry of their wives. No man wanted to condone the murder of children and no man wanted to sign the order that would eradicate every slave in their city. But they _would_ so long as the Blood Mage was still in their city, pouring his curses into deserving mouths.

Altair was humming while he thought, a deep-mellow song. He had forgotten the words that matched the music but the tune was seared into his throat and when he hummed it, it filled every part of his body with a cold certainty. 

There was a rare chance, indeed, to saw the little minds of the men that ruled the city but in order to secure their favor he would have to have dual purposes. The Blood Mage must be found and brought to justice for the good of the city. Robert De Sable would appoint him the task (if only to try to exchange fucking for good favor when he did). Altair would be obliged to hunt the city for the man he’d already found. 

Yes, there was much to do and Altair did not move from his bed. 

\--

Claudia did not ask him to leave but there was fear in her movements and her face that had not been there before. The confidence she had in him only two days ago: rebellious and sure, had been replaced by the mortal realization of far greater dangers. He stayed only long enough to hear her in the halls, sending away as many of the girls as had the means to leave. Malik thought he might have asked her if she had anywhere else to go but it seemed safer (for her, at least) if he just left instead.

So, he took the clothes that she had given him, a small vial of water he had blessed, a small packet of the leaves that would staunch the free flow of his blood, and walked back to the city. The day was so new that the bazaar was still quiet. He lingered at the empty stalls, picking up fallen bits of useless jewelry and something that might have been a sort of money in this city. He slid both into his pocket and followed the smell of food (even if he did not mean to) around the empty streets. 

His search led him to a long narrow house with a sheet strung across as a door. There were women in the yard before it, poking at a low fire with a blackened stick while they hummed to themselves. It was a working-son, the sort of tune that Malik might have heard his Mother sing as she cooked for the family. The song his brother had liked to hum to himself whenever they were sent to collect food from the forest. 

The woman looked up at him when his shadow ran across her outstretched arm. The fear that crossed her face was so instant and immediate that he put up both his palms to stall her scream of fear. But the rustle of her body falling sideways alerted others that were still inside. There were skinny naked children that ran out to cover her and a man as large as the house that he had been inside of. 

“I meant no harm,” Malik said. He held both hands up to prove his innocence and did not flinch (or fight) when the man grabbed his wrist to drag him forward and squint at the ley lines on his hands. It lasted only a minute before he was released. “I am Malik.”

“Rauf,” the man said. He pulled at the length of his beard and then motioned at the woman who had righted herself and pulled the children up against her chest. Her face was caught between _crying_ and joy, the confusing mix of colors and dampness of her eyes making it impossible to know what she thought. Rauf called her, “Rana.”

“It is you,” Rana said. She was crying when she said it.

But Rauf pulled at him and motioned toward the house, “go, inside where you cannot be seen with great ease.” Then he motioned all the children back inside the long house. It was barely wide enough that Malik could have laid in it without having to bend his knees to keep from knocking his head into the wall. There were rows of bunks stacked on one another, rumpled blankets and flat pillows marking where each little head had laid. In the farthest corner, there were familiar letters cut into the wood and drawings of the trees of their home. 

“Be still,” Rauf said, “we will bring you something to eat in a moment.” Then he left again but the children remained. 

There were half a dozen of them, each of them with soft fingertips that touched at the glimmering colors on his skin. One of the girls looked at the web of lines that ran down his neck with _intense_ admiration that made her mouth hang open as she stared. They did not speak to him. When their parents returned, they scattered back to their beds in a great flurry of limbs.

Rana laid a steaming bowl in his lap and sat at his feet on her bent knees. She smiled at him with contentment that he had not seen since his Mother had died. She was a rare woman, so the old women of his village said, one of the truest believers they had ever met. A woman who could weather every hardship with the benefit of her faith. Life was terrible to his Mother but she was unwavering in her beliefs.

“I have been frightened,” Rana said to him, “I have been so afraid that our God could not see us here. I have spent my nights in constant prayer for the sake of my children. I have woken in the morning with doubt as black as the starless night. I have been certain the cruel flame of the dead goddess would certainly steal the soul of my children. But you have come. You are the sign I have prayed for.”

“How?” Malik asked. 

“My children were born in this place. I have wondered all these years if they would be granted he benefit of our God’s promise. But you have come, and we will all be free.” Then she motioned at the food. “Eat,” she said, “and when you have finished, teach me how to free my children.”

Malik looked up at Rauf. He expected to see some disagreement, to see at least something besides the quiet resignation to the idea. Rauf was _weary_ the way only the oldest of mages looked. The weight of the lives pressing them solidly down toward the earth while fate and death denied them the release from the living hell. “Is that truly what you want?”

“I would rather die with my family than be fodder to feed the ravenous flame of a dead Goddess,” Rauf said. The looked at his children, each of them wide-eyed and curious at the words. He ran his fingers through the littlest one’s hair. “We have been selfish. We should not have brought children into our hell.”

Malik looked down at Rana, “I can show you,” he said, “but it is very hard work and it does not always happen quickly.” He pulled his sleeve up to show the ley lines. “Before any spell can be uttered, you must make these. It takes time, faith and concentration.”

“I will gladly give you all three,” Rana said. “If that is the price of our freedom.” Then she motioned at the bowl of food she had brought him. “Eat. Please.”

\--

Altair had not made it farther than the front door of the Justice building (where he was greeted with the truly inspired statement: “Where is the gratitude? We have improved their lives, and this is how they thank us? By bringing an—an—assassin into kill us while we sleep? If it weren’t for us they would still be sleeping in trees like animals.”) before he was immediately called to the High Judge’s office. 

Robert was there, sitting in one of the large chairs that stood by the Head Judge’s desk. Robert seemed very pleased to see him in a way that was devoid of his usual level of casual lust. Rather than leer at him, he nodded approvingly as he motioned at Altair. “This is the man for you, sir. There is nobody else that is as capable or as likely to find this assassin. He has the uncanny ability to imagine how these animals think.”

The High Judge sat very upright in his seat with his hands pressed together and then pushed against his flat mouth. He looked as if he were old enough to become a true skeleton. The bones were pushing out from under his paper-thin skin. His eyes bulged from their sockets as he focused on him with more concentrate and awareness than it seemed possible. After a moment his mouth opened and the sound it made was like a death rattle. His voice was a whistle, he said, “yes, I see he is the man. What will you need to find this—”

“Blood mage,” Robert filled in for him.

Then the High Judge raised his eyebrows to imply the question be answered now.

Altair drew in a breath and held it for a pause. He pressed his fingertips against his wrist and thought carefully about what allowances he would be allowed and which ones would be too offensive to ask. Regardless of Robert’s ulterior motives for offering him this attempt at prestige, Altair could advance his cause with the right amount of power. He said, “I believe there are sympathetic citizens in our city that believe they are doing what is— _morally right_ ,” he said the words carefully to convey that he neither believed nor did not believe the words. “It would be most beneficial to apprehending the—” what had they called the Blood Mage, “assassin,” the word had a foul taste in his mouth, “if the citizens were sure that we are absolute in our disapproval of his methods and justice for those who assist him is swift and decisive.”

The High Judge narrowed his eyes and then said, “speak plainly.”

“Allow me to find and make a public spectacle of any person or persons who have harbored or assisted the Blood Mage in causing this panic in our city.” 

Robert did not look surprised that Altair would ask for the right to execute but he did look as if he did not approve of the request. 

The High Judge took a minute (at least) to think it through before he nodded his head. “Granted,” he said, “be very certain and very clear that those you make an example of are _guilty_ of the crime you intend to execute them for.”

Altair inclined his head, “of course, sir.”

“I do not know what you have done to earn Robert’s good favor,” (Altair had not yet done anything but he imagined the demands for proper reparations would follow soon), “Your failure would be an unforgiveable embarrassment,” the High Judge said. “Do not fail.” 

\--

Malik had instructed Rana in the very basics of developing ley lines. Compared to the years of study it required to grow long, healthy, _useful_ ley lines (capable of magic of varying sorts), instructing on how to develop a single, sturdy line had taken only minutes. Rana was a quick student, eager and willing to concentrate all her will and time into tunneling the energy that was kept in her heart to the surface of her skin. It had taken her only a few minutes of effort to show the first pink mark of success. To kill her children, herself and her husband she needed only a thin line as long as her finger that she could cut open. He told her the words of the spell and she had repeated them back to him many times before he was sure she would remember them.

When he left them, Rana had been preparing to go to her Master’s house to make breakfast for the family and Rauf had been on his way to attend his many chores. The children had divided themselves between their parents, already weary with the day’s work. 

Malik did not wander, but return to the bazaar now filled with life. He found a seat in a discreet corner and watched the men and women. He listened to the cadence of their words as they talked and talked in incessant circles. They were angry and scared, it showed on their eyes as they glared at the slaves assisting the merchants in the bazaar. 

Malik watched a quick-footed slave boy (far too light-skinned to have been born from any region Malik recognized as home) slipping in and out of the crowd to reach his destination. He retrieved the parcel of fruits he had been sent to get and made his way through the crowd. Bad luck made him misstep into the path of a white woman with bleached-white-hair. He fell into her leg. Her scream startled everyone around her but her shriek of anger drew the Enforcers that were moving through the restless crowd.

“This child attacked me!” she pulled her skirt out from under the boy. There was a brown smear down the front of it. The fear on the child’s face was far more real than the woman’s. The boy put his hands up to hold off her words, “look! It’s blood.” 

The very words made the crowd bristle like a single living thing. The other mages were watching with their mouths open and their cheeks gone pale but they did nothing.

“ _Be still_ ,” Malik whispered to himself. 

The Enforcer that caught the boy by the wrist was white-and-red-spotted. The one next to him was trying to calm the crowd with his hands in the air and his voice a clear sound in the chaos. “Ma’am,” he said, “it is only dirt. Ma’am.”

“Blood!” the woman shrieked. “This mongrel boy has tried to curse me!”

Malik let out a breath that filled space inside his hood with heat. He drew in another as his heart started beating hard against his breast bone. The curving ley lines over his shoulders were tingling with the sudden force of energy pushed into them. He rose to his feet as the crowd reached a fever pitch of noise. 

Men-and-women, driven by animal panic, were shouting at the Enforcers who had tucked the boy behind their backs. There were four men in uniform versus the swelling crowd of so many. Malik took a knife off the edge of a stall and pulled his right sleeve up. The thickest and deepest of ley lines on his arms started at the inside of his right elbow and ran straight down to his middle finger. He cut into it, threw the knife to the ground and cupped his hand to catch the blood. 

The crowd did not part for him, and so he let his damp fingers drag across their bodies, spread his blood on their sleeves, hands, shoulders and necks as he went. He forced his way through, stepped in between the shrieking woman and the Enforcers that were protecting the child. He slapped his bloody hand across her gaping mouth to silence her impassioned lies. He said, “ _speak no more_ ,” to her. She jerked back from the sight of him, from the blood that spread over her yawning mouth like a crude attempt at face paint. Her delicate-white-fingers pressed against the dripping mess. Her body heaved to voice a scream that she could not utter. (Not now, not ever again.) 

As far as curses went, sealing someone to silence was minor enough it barely warranted notice. The crowd did not settle around him but drew in a breath of peace. The men and women who noticed (at last) the blood streaked across them opened their mouths to scream in panic. But no sound issued forth. He had named the curse for the blood he spilt. 

The Enforcers drew weapons, short swords and daggers, and Malik shook his head at them. 

Rather than attempt reason, he pulled his sleeve up far enough to squeeze fresh blood from the wound and he sprinkled it across the ground at his feet, he said, “ _all that stand upon this earth cry for the evil they have condoned_.” It was a spectacular spectacle, to force the crowd to weep. Even the Enforcers had swollen red eyes and shaking arms as they looked at him.

The boy crept out from between the men. He looked at Malik with the same tears in his eyes as the citizens. He said, “they killed my Mother. I know they did and I did not call them liars.” The words he spoke were the words of the citizens of the city. The boy’s tears were as insincere as the ones on the faces of the men all around them but the tremble in his words did _hurt_.

Malik could do nothing for the boy. Whoever his Mother might have been, she did not put the truth of their God’s promise in the boy. Through ignorance or forgetfulness, she had made it impossible to free the child of his current hell. Rather than try, Malik said, “go,” to him and pointed out through the weeping crowd.

The curse he cast was worthless for most things, it invoked a terrible but temporary agony. It was, at best, a trick. Still it afforded him the time to push back through the crowd of ducked heads, past the weeping men and women to the anonymous side-streets that would give him a chance to hide when they recovered. 

He had not made it fully down the alley before a voice stopped him. “If I do not cry does that mean I have condoned no evil?” The words were chilly but the _voice_ that spoke them was so toneless it was _inhuman_. 

Malik turned back to look at Altair. He stood at the opposite end of the alley, just beyond the weeping crowd with his hands placidly behind his back. He was _smiling_ so softly it made the deadness of his words contradict his face. “No,” Malik said. “Some men know no goodness. Evil is meaningless to them.”

“Why didn’t you kill the boy?” Altair asked. “I thought you intended to kill all of our slave children. I don’t disagree, it is a far better fate than the one that awaits them. Do you know how old the average slave is when they are raped for the first time?”

Malik grit his teeth against the words. They were an obvious barb, meant to incite him to react rashly. “All evil must be answered for,” Malik said.

The glimmer around Altair could hardly grow brighter without becoming visible to every eye. It fluttered instead, long enough to acknowledge the words. But Altair’s smile did not falter. “Run and hide, mage. I do not want to catch you yet.” Then he turned back toward the crowd, his voice was loud and only just audible at the distance as he said, “he did not come this way, search the crowd, search the merchants stalls and the east streets!”

\--

Unsurprisingly, the search at the bazaar failed to turn up the blood mage. Altair did not allow his men a respite simply because the conclusion was obvious. Rather, he sent them to the Great Houses, where the rich men kept the most slaves. He tasked them to search through every slave house, to ruffle the feathers of the men whose continuing support of the slave trade had brought the Blood Mage to their shores. 

There was no need for him to supervise the search on the street. Rather than stay and be sure they finished sniffling (as many of them were, even an hour later), he spent a moment staring down at the blood that had dried into the dusty earth. The High Priests had been called to cleanse the area; the bazaar had been shut down until a sufficient ritual could be enacted. Before they came, Altair stood and looked down at it.

“Sir,” the Captain said from the side. His voice was raw from his useless weeping. “It’s not safe to stand so close, sir.”

Altair drew in a breath as he looked away from the blood, over at the Captain who was motioning him away with great caution. “Suppose you came to a city that killed and enslaved your kind. Where would you find refuge? What sort of person would give you shelter?” Altair turned toward the harbor. He was separated from it by two streets and several buildings but the smell of the water was nearly as heavy as the sting of the flame ever burning over their heads. 

“Bring me the whores,” Altair said, “one from every house. Bring me the one that cringes at the sight of you; one of them has seen our mage.” Then he stepped around the speckles of blood. “Go as quickly as you can and bring them to my office.” 

“Yes, sir,” the Captain said.

\--

Malik had not thought to bring an excess of bandages. He had no means to wrap the bleeding wound that made his sleeve sticky and left an easy trail of red drops as he tried to find a safe place to hide. Out of desperation (and not good sense) he went _up_. Instinct born of years living in trees had instilled in him the need for high hiding places. The children of his village, of all the border villages, learned to climb trees that stretched toward the clouds themselves long before they learned to talk or where to piss. Survival depended on hiding, hiding depended on the ability to be unseen in the dense trees when the slavers came to take them away. 

His right hand was weak but his left was strong. He pulled himself up the side of one of the soot-covered buildings, up and-and-up until the dizzying distance from the ground brought him some relief from the fear of discovery. Still he kept going, finding shallow holes for his fingers and little bits of stone sticking out that were enough to rest his foot on. He crawled through a window near the very top of the building, expecting that it would be empty and was unprepared to interrupt a small gathering. 

They were familiar faces—not those of his village—but with the features of same region. They gasped at him the way he stared back. They saw the blood tacky on his fingers and soaked into the sleeve of his clothes and they moved all at once.

“You are safe with us,” they swore to him, “we have found this place—it is unseen by the men of the city.” They tore lengths of clothe off their clothes and wrapped his wound so tightly it stung and bled freshly into the white strips. Then they washed his hand with more reverence than he deserved. He sat with them, stripped shirtless and mumbling his gratitude for their assistance. 

They fell into silence. One of the boys (for he was not a man, yet), said, “I have seen the village that you are from. I heard it from the old women that taught blood magic. They said, there is a funny boy in the eastern village that learns blood magic. He is very good, they said. But he is funny.” 

“They did not call me funny in my village,” Malik said. “They called me gay.” Oh and the others laughed, all their faces pink across their cheeks as they snickered and hid their grins. Whether or not they had heard the same rumor and were trying to spare him the repeating of it could not be said. But they nodded in agreement.

“The old women must not have wanted to call you gay,” one boy said.

“Yes, Peninah was convinced she could make a husband of you,” another said. “I remember she talked about you the way she should have talked about her husband.” And the boys who had been there to witness it were snickering to themselves, each of them mocking the way the woman toyed with her hair or straightened her clothes. They were all smiling together. 

“You had a brother,” the middle one said. “I remember. You had the brother that would not hunt. He said he would not hunt because he did not want to kill. I remember because there were many that laughed at the two of you, a boy who studied to be a blood mage and a boy who refused to become a man.” And there grins were broad at the words. 

Malik smiled with them. Kadar had fought the idea that he would have to hunt like the other men of the village to the very end. When he relented (at last) it was only because their father and mother had refused to provide for him a moment longer. He went weeks eating nothing but the fruits and vegetables he had harvested but the constant slow-roasting smell of fresh meat had driven him to hunt in the end. “He did become a man in the end.”

“Ah,” they said. “And you—you have become a savior.”

“I am not savior. I have left my village when I should not have. I travelled for weeks when I should have been still. What I have done is not the work of our people.” Malik rubbed his hand against the bandage they had applied and thought of the crowd that had swelled forward to put an end to the innocent child. 

“No,” the oldest boy said. “You _are_ our savior. We had started to forget, we had lost our way. These people that live here, they worship their dead Goddess. We have no choice but to witness the proof of her each day. The flame has never dimmed but stayed a mad, growling beast. You were brought here by the crying of our people; you will be our salvation.”

And another said, “Will you teach us what you know? Will you teach us what you did with the children at the dock?”

Malik’s smile fell from his face. He rubbed at the raw wound beneath the bandage on either arm before he let out a small sigh. “Is there no hope for escape? Can you run and swim? I know the way back to our village.”

“We’re not afraid to die,” another said. His voice was deep even when spoken from such skinny ribs. “If we run and we are caught, they will put us in the fire. I am not afraid to die but I will not pay tribute to their dead goddess.”

They all nodded their heads, one after another until they settled their eyes back on Malik, waiting for his answer. “Yes, I will teach you.” He only needed a moment to listen to their voices, to look at the familiarity of their faces and feel something besides _fury_ and dread. He could not stall them with stories of the world they had come from. There was no humor left in their faces; only the open defiance that they still had the means to escape their fates. “Tell me of the man called Altair. What is he?” 

(And _why_ did he let Malik go.)

“The others that I live with, they say his mother was a slave. I heard them tell the story: his father was a rich white man, a good man in the city. When Altair was born, his Mother asked him to free his son. The rich white man said he didn’t need a son so badly he would raise the half-breed. She put Altair on the steps of Temple where they raise orphans. He looks like the other men, he took after his rich white father. They think he is one of them.”

Malik’s whole body was _cold_. The promise of their God had to be passed from Mother to child, each Mother sang the words into the soft pink shell of their child’s ear at birth. In this way, every mage that was born—no matter how removed from their home—would benefit from the sacrifice their blood demanded. That promise would not spare Altair the stain of his many sins but it would render him _immune_ to any trivial curse. “He is one of us,” Malik said but every-word-ached in his throat. “He has done this to our people.”

“Not alone. They have all done it. He is honest. They’re not. The other men of the city hate him. They think he is radical because he says what they think. Maybe they know what he really is.” Then the boy shifted the way he sat, “show us while we have the time.”

So Malik taught them the way he had taught Rana.

\--

Altair did not have the chance to enjoy the solitude of his office long. He had only had long enough to observe the clotted crowds near the temples, and the growing protest of sympathetic wives and weak-willed men asking for the slaves to be freed. An unhappy thought had blossomed in the center of his mind: any man that took refuge in a whorehouse was likely to take advantage of the hospitality of the generous hostess. 

The naked hostility that churned in his gut was not a foreign feeling. He dwelled on it; he amused himself with the thoughts of what he would do with the woman that had given this mage shelter. (He thought, he would very much appreciate if she resisted offering a confession. He thought of the things he would ask her. It was difficult to evoke shame from a whore but it was not impossible. He could manage it.)

His musing was interrupted by the door opening behind him. Altair did not bother to turn but let out a slow breath in preparation of dealing with whoever had been sent to interrupt him. He anticipated being called to Robert’s office but not the hands that slid across his side toward his chest. The body that pressed against his was massive, wide and tall and perfume-scented. Altair moved his hands from behind him. 

“Robert.”

Robert hummed in response. His hand squeezed Altair’s chest. “You are a bold man.” Robert said. “There are not many who would have the gall to ask the High Judge for the allowances you wanted.” 

Altair stared out the window, at the crowd of protestors that were shouting. He could see the passion of their beliefs even if he could not hear their words. It was the passion that had always drawn him closer as a child. The cause was never as important. He craved the passion that others felt. So he watched them, far-far beneath him as they called for the freedom of the slaves.

Robert’s mouth was a foggy wet heat just beneath his ear. His wandering hand had dipped low across his belly, the edge of his fingers stepping their way lower-and-lower. “I have always admired your tenacity even when I could not approve of your methods.” The weight of his body against Altair’s back was _close_ , _heavy_ until it made the flesh along his back feel as if were full of worms. He gritted his teeth until the taste of blood spread in his mouth and Robert’s hand gripped at his hip as he leaned against Altair’s back to make him tip forward. 

“Why me?” Altair asked. Since they were there and he could not ignore the hand that had slipped inside of his robe. There were ringers feeling across his chest: broad and rough and _unwelcome_. Altair did not wait for Robert to drag words from the pit of his stomach. He did not need to know the reason when the man was content to grind his dick against Altair’s body with more presumption than could be tolerated. “Does my skin excite you?” he asked. 

“Yes,” Robert said. And his hand slid up the back of Altair’s neck to push his head forward. His fingers cupped around his skull, pushing his hair here-and-there as they went. 

Altair’s chin was against his chest and he had to slap his hands against the frame of his window to keep from being shoved into the glass. His every breath was wet-and-red, sucked in through his bloody mouth. (He thought of Malik, of how hatefully he looked at Altair. He thought of the whole of his body covered in those thin-glimmering lines. He thought of the whites of his teeth and the darkness of his eyes.) “My Mother’s skin excited my father,” Altair said softly. He did not need Robert to hear the words or even to understand them. 

The hand that had been palming at his crotch (uselessly) slid up to grip around his waist and pull him back more fully.

Altair shifted his stance so he could lean his weight to the left and spare his right hand. He did not try to pull Robert away, but turned to hook a hand around his neck. It was easy to press his mouth to the man’s. Robert moaned at it, hands like claws tightening on his flesh. Every touch he laid on Altair a presumption of agreement and ownership because he had shown Altair minimal, selfish kindness. 

So they stumbled sideways, toward the desk. Altair’s thigh hit it hard enough to bruise but he did not make a sound. Robert’s hands tore his clothes like they were poorly made paper. He dug his fingernails into Altair’s arm. He might have shoved his tongue into Altair’s mouth. 

The idea of it was so vile it made his stomach seize at the thought. Altair’s fingers crept across the desk as he tipped his head back and Robert took it to mean he should put his filthy mouth on him. He sucked at Altair’s skin to leave marks and did not care about anything else. Altair’s hand closed around the slim, warm handle of a knife he kept hidden under a stack of papers. He pulled it closer to him as he arched his back and Robert’s greedy hands tore his clothing open so it hung loosely around his chest. His mouth was ravenous as it sucked at his skin. 

But he stopped, very suddenly, when his mouth closed across the electric red glimmer. Robert pulled back with his mouth gone dumb in shock and his hands half tangled in the tatters of Altair’s clothes. He might have worked to speaking his assumption but Altair did not give him the time.

No, he dragged the knife lengthwise through one of the skinny ley lines that grew outward from his heart and he rubbed the blood into his fingertips before he surged forward and shoved those fingers into Robert’s mouth. “I am _not_ yours,” Altair said. They were not words of any real intent. He pulled his fingers back before Robert could bite his hand (the fool would try) and stood in front of him. “Go _mad_ ,” was the curse he put on him. “Rave and scream and _die_ but do not speak of this to any man.” Then he rubbed his hand across the skinny drops of blood on his chest and smeared them on Robert’s lips to be sure the curse would work. When he was finished they stood with heavy breath, regarding one another.

“You,” Robert said.

Altair looked down at his clothes. “I am not ungrateful for the advancements you have given me,” he said. “But you should have been satisfied with your private thoughts.” There was no way to fix the clothing that had been torn. He had a spare shirt, but not a spare uniform. He would have to endure the side-long stares and the whispering. It seemed a comparatively small price to pay in light of the pleasure of watching Robert’s demise. “I have told you since I came to the Academy: mages will destroy your city. They are a growing enemy, a great beast that will roar to life one day and devour you all. Aminali has not listened to me—they think I am radical.” He pulled his uniform off, first the outer robe and then his shirt. His own attempt at ley lines were shallow and unimpressive in comparison to the blood mage's. 

Robert wrinkled his nose in disgust.

“I will kill every mage that bows his head to men like you,” Altair said. “I will burn their people to the extinction if that is what I must do to find one that will fight.” He pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk and pulled out the neatly folded shirt he kept there. It did not fit him as well as his uniform but it covered the length of his arms and the glittering lines on his chest. 

\--

The boys had offered him whatever reward they could provide in exchange for the knowledge he gave them. There were many things he may have benefited from: food, decent water, a change of clothing, bandages, but he had asked them where he could find Altair’s house. They drew a map on the floor of their hiding place before they left, each of them going back to the duties that they had been hiding from. 

Malik stayed until the frantic sound of footsteps far beneath him seemed to go still and quiet. He laid in the golden sunshine, flat on his back and watched the dust dancing in the light. He thought of Kadar. 

He thought of the things he remembered about his brother: how he smiled even when they were stuck with rain showers that lasted for days, his quick-witted jokes that kept the children busy while their parents patrolled for invaders in the distance, his mighty objections against the slaughter of animals (and his eventual, sad surrender of the ideal as he cried over the taste of fresh meat cut from the beast he had killed) and of his stories that went on-and-on and on. 

Kadar had not been his only brother but he had been only one that survived infancy. Malik had kept near him all the long days until his brother could walk and climb and run. It seemed to him that a child that could run was a child that would not succumb so easily to the invaders that came in the gray mornings to take sleeping babies. 

Kadar had given him a second name when they were kids, when Malik sat with his shirt off in the clearing and concentrated all his time and energy into drawing ley lines across his skin. Kadar called him Malak (a girl’s name) while he sat with him: bored and unable to leave. He told stories of the lucky man that would make Malak his wife and how they would have many unhappy babies. On and on his stories had gone, growing ever more ridiculous as they went until Malik could not keep from smiling at them.

Kadar said, “I always break you. You try and you try but I always break you.” 

Malik lay in the golden sunshine, uncertain of the path he should take in life, indecisive over the praise he had received. Those boys had hailed him a savior but he felt, very much, the opposite. He had not come to inspire his people with faith but to find a brother he had known (every step that brought him here) was surely dead. 

He thought of Altair, with a glimmer on his skin, _all evil must be answered for_. 

He thought of the girls outside the temple, _have you come to be the reckoning we have prayed for?_.

 

He thought of his Mother, with her light touch and her sweet voice as she said, _be still, be brave._

But it was his brother, the slow memory of his smile and his laugh. _I always break you._

The time for peace had passed him. He had left it behind him on the dusty trails. The conscience of his people was safe in the trees of his village where he had left his family behind. They would consider him dead; better that they think him safely departed than the living nightmare he would become. The focus of his thoughts shifted while he lay under the sunshine. He did not daydream but _remember_ the laws of magic the old women had taught him. Layer-by-layer he sought for the vilest curse he could imagine.

\--

Perhaps the only humor to be found in the unfortunate memory of Robert’s unwanted advances, was the piggish-choked-noises Robert made when he tried to announce what he had found on Altair’s naked skin. His pale face was flushed red as he wrinkled his nose and puckered his mouth to spit any word of the truth out. The madness had not set in but the silence that had stolen his words may have been the start of insanity. 

Altair did not stay to openly watch but he caught the sight of Robert grabbing a secretary in both of his great, meaty hands. His looming body hovered over the secretary’s face as he spewed spittle from between his pursed lips in an attempt to speak. It was unwise to watch further, so Altair did not linger. He went, instead, to the interrogation rooms that were set into the back wall of the Justice building where the fire of the Eternal Flame kept the stone hot. The air was thick in the back of the building, full of the stench of roasting bodies and unwashed soot.

The whores that he had sent for were arriving. One from Black Billie’s, one from the Plump Pumpkin. They sat in the chairs, knees together and hands in their laps, looking one way and the other with fear in their eyes that made the gaudy red smear of their mouths more clownish than average. But there fear was no _frantic_. He sat in a seat opposite them, lay his hands on his lap, and waited. 

More came, one by one, each of them put into seats to glare at him with open defiance or to quietly shrink into small balls waiting execution. It was not (but the smallest of technicalities) illegal to be a whore in Aminali. It was unwise when the Enforcers were looking for occupants to fill their barracks but so long as a working girl was also devout and showed up for services at the Temples, there was no crime in their occupation. 

Altair did not care to what use these women put their bodies; least not as long as none of them were the one that had offered _shelter_ and _comfort_ to the blood mage. His imagination had never been endless, but precise. He sat and considered each of them. The pasty white thighs of the girl from The Plump Pumpkin, the dark-dark skin of the woman from The Whorehouse (so aptly named), the sweet-pink skin of the crying woman who came from Black Billie’s. He stared at them, without moving his hands, without changing his breathing. He did nothing but look at them as he imagined their eager thighs and greedy hands pulling at the blood mage. 

(He did _not_ think of Robert. He did _not_ think of the offense of that man’s hands on him.)

But it was not until the woman from the Blooming Rose came in—cringing and skittish—that Altair was satisfied he had found what he searched for. He looked at her: a skinny, white, coltish thing and waved his hand to send the others away. “Return them,” he said. Then he stood and crossed the narrow hall to the last whore. He said, “tell me about the blood mage and I will not kill you.”

Oh-and-she- _cried_.

\--

Malik found Altair’s house, tucked into a shabby street of many same-faced houses. The convenience of the layout of the streets eased the unfamiliar nature of the city. Finding his way through the trees of his home had been more cumbersome than following a series of turns and counting house-fronts until he came to Altair’s. The front of the house faced the street too directly for him to attempt to find an open entrance so he looked over his shoulder to be sure there were no overt witnesses before he went around the back. There was a cluster of poorly tended bushes in the back, a flat bed of wilting herbs that dearly needed to be tended to. The door that faced the back was securely locked against intruders and there was a curious ward carved into the frame. It was the sort of thing that kept out the unruly spirits of the dead that had escaped Death, but it seemed an unlikely superstition for Altair to have. 

It was easy to climb the back of the house to the partially opened window on the second floor. He was able to hang onto the sill and open the window fully enough to climb inside without incident. Once inside, he checked to be sure he hadn’t left blood stains behind to give himself away. 

Altair’s bedroom was barren. Malik was not certain what he’d hoped to find in the house but he could not shake the sense of disappointment that came from standing in the empty room. There was a bed, precisely made, and a wardrobe. When he opened the wardrobe, there were only a few sets of clothes: two uniforms, a few shirts, and a pair of pants. There were no boxes, no trinkets, and no personal items of any kind. He looked under the bed and found nothing.

The other rooms upstairs were filled only by cobwebs and dust. 

Downstairs there was a plain sitting room with high back chairs and low shelves discreetly filled with books. Malik pulled out a book or two (not to read, but to look at the shape of them) and found the pages were all empty. The spines seemed to indicate they were texts of some kind but the insides were as bare as the home itself. There was a fireplace that might never have been used. 

The room that must have been used for eating was clean and well-cared for. The plates were set out for a dinner that might never come. Candles were arranged to shed optimal light. But the chairs stood on the four sides of the unused table, a set of perfect strangers that had never shared a meal. 

There was a kitchen, barely used.

Malik ran his fingers across the stove to test how deep the ash of the fire meant for cooking would go and found only the slightest film. If it had ever been used, it had only been to provide the impression that it was used regularly. Outwardly, the home seemed the same to him as any home in the whole of the city might have. Every part of it was hollowed-out. Every part was _lacking_ life. 

He sat on the short wooden chair in the kitchen and tried to reason out how he could defeat a man who lacked anything _identifiable_ as human. There were many small curses he could leave behind. Each of them reminiscent of a discomfort any normal person might have found objectionable. The oldest of the blood mages had told him (very quietly) that the greatest insults to another were not the forbidden curses that robbed a man of free will or life but the small ones. Sitting in the unused kitchen, Malik did not think Altair would notice a new discomfort and if he did, it would not be objectionable. 

Whatever he left behind needed to _disturb_ Altair. It needed to grow like a sore under his skin. Deprivation did not hurt him, there was no reason to think further punishment would impress him. 

\--

The barracks smelled like piss, sweat, blood and slow-rotting death. The earth itself seemed to sag with the extreme weight of the condemned. Altair found the post at the door of the barracks empty (again) and sneered at the oversight. Doubtlessly, the men that were meant to guard it had gone inward through the tunnels to find company for the night. It suited his purpose that he was not observed carrying the large canvas bag into the barracks. 

Abbas was not sleeping but crouching against a wall, scratching his thick-filthy hair with the curls of his nails in a distinctly animalistic way. He barely looked up when the door opened and when he did take note of it, it was only to squint his eyes at Altair and offer a disapproving frown. He scuttled sideways, walking with his knees bent and his backs against the wall, seeking some imagined safety in the short distance between them. “No,” he said, as he sometimes did. “No.”

Altair set the bag on the table. There was no way to keep the tools he had brought from rattling against the wood. The canvas did little to muffle the telltale sound of metal-on-wood and the ominous noise drew Abbas’ attention. Altair lit a larger torch and set it in his its holder. “Nightmares? Are you hearing things again?”

Abbas spit at him. He dug his elbows into his poor bad, a nearly flat mat set on the floor and pulled his whole body into it with a great roll of rotting-cloth and bony-parts. “No,” he said again. “I will not play your game tonight.”

“That’s unfair,” Altair said. He sat on the chair and pulled open the canvas bag. The silver knife was gleaming-and-cold, very nearly humming with promise as he drew it out and set it on the table. He took out a saw that he had bought some time ago in anticipation of such a need. There was rope, a glass bottle, a length of clothe that could be used as a gag and a great length of bandages. “You act as if I were the one that started this game.” He pulled open the fastenings of his shirt at his neck, and his wrists and pulled it over his head, folded it neatly and set it on the canvas bag. 

“No,” Abbas said. It seemed illogical that he was still capable of fear. The acceptance of the inevitable should have replaced fear long ago. Yet, he persisted. His face went white-and-pink, his eyes watered, he crouched his body in a ball as small as he could make it. It was a far departure from the large-wide-man that he had been. His sallow skin and his filthy hair were unrecognizable compared to what they had been ten years ago.

“Come,” Altair said. He stood up. The lowness of the ceiling meant he had to duck his head (which he did not enjoy). He moved the canvas bag from the table along with his shirt and the bandages and motioned at the table. “Come now. I have come to kill you.”

That made Abbas start. Hope was an odd expression on his face. “You lie.”

“I am sincere. I have questions, two small requirements and then I will allow you to die.” He motioned at the table. 

“What requirements?”

“Your arms,” Altair said. The he motioned at the table again. He drew a bottle out of his pocket. It contained a heavy syrup that he had been reliably informed would render any man incapable of feeling. While he felt no sympathy or kindness for Abbas, it was inconvenient to him if the man struggled. The meat and bone needed to be preserved for optimal use. “If you answer my questions, I will give you this.”

Abbas stared at him from the corner he was still hiding in. “I stay here until you are finished asking.”

It was an acceptable compromise. Altair sat on the table and rested his hands on his lap. “Why did you try to kill me?” In the immediate aftermath of the attempt on his life, he had not been moved to wonder about the cause of it. The struggle to survive the attempt on his life had taken the whole of his energy and concentration. 

Since this was to be their final conversation, Abbas pushed the strings of hair away from his face and sat with his back to the corner. His thin legs were crossed in front of him and he scratched thoughtfully at his beard. “You deserve to die.”

“I believe that is a matter of perspective.”

Abbas huffed a laugh, hollow and wet. Then he dropped his hands into his lap and tipped his head back so it was resting against the corner. For a moment, it seemed that he may have forgotten what had moved him to make the attempt. 

Altair had not forgotten. The memory of the attempt on his life was as clear to him today as it had been the day that it happened. The cold-piercing pain that torn into his back followed after him as he went, the pull of the puckered scar when he stretched a _constant_ reminder of the assault. “I was a child.”

“How many children have you killed?” Abbas asked. “Do you even remember them? You ask me why I would want you dead—you should know. It does not take much effort to kill someone, does it, Altair?”

“If you cannot answer my questions, we will simply move on. I assure you that it will take me some time to prepare you to die. I am equally sure that I will derive some small sense of vindication at finally repaying the kindness you showed me once.” He moved to stand but Abbas put his hands up to stall the motion. 

“You disgusted me,” he said. “Do you imagine your blood mage is the first of our people to come searching for a lost loved one? We are not so different in age. _You_ ,” Abbas hissed, “one of us, one of the mages that are used carelessly as slaves, living as one of the fine citizens of this city. The truth of your heritage is _brilliantly_ obvious and yet they were willing to ignore it. I watched you in the yard, ordering around the men you should have respect as your elders. It disgusted me. You have always deserved to die.” The color did come back to his face (briefly) and the deep hollows around his eyes added ominous shadow to his words. For a brief moment, it seemed like he were the same man he had been at the start. 

Altair could not argue that point. There were many perspectives that demanded his death, far more than his sole indifferent opinion that he should be allowed to live. “Do you regret your choice?”

“I regret it was unsuccessful.”

Altair stood then, “it was only partially unsuccessful. I am dead.” He motioned at the table. “You will be soon. Come on now. Take off your shirt.” He held out the vial of syrup and watched Abbas hesitate in the corner. Perhaps, after so many years, he thought he would appreciate a few more moments of this useless life. He did relent at last. He pulled his shirt off over his head. 

The whole of his torso was covered in the many scars of these past ten years. The long-gray ley lines he had once thought to grow were furrows in his flesh. The pink scars that cut across them were raised-and-flat and dipped depending on how deep Altair had made them. Looking at him was looking at a careful portrait, the whole history of their unfortunate acquaintance was spread out across Abbas’ skin. He came slowly, creeping on the balls of his feet with his fingers touching the ground to balance himself. Rather than lay on the table (as was customary) he held out his hand for the syrup. 

Rather than give it to him, Altair pulled the cork and tipped it to pour into his open mouth. 

Abbas grimaced at the taste and then straightened up enough to sit on the table. He looked up at Altair’s face. “What has he done, this blood mage?”

“Lay down,” Altair said. He pulled a leather strap out of the bandages and motioned for Abbas to let his arm hang to the side. He slid it around the highest part of his arm and pulled it so tight the skin was blanched white beneath it. “He caused one man to explode. He killed many children. He silenced a screaming woman.” More amusingly, “he compelled a great crowd to cry over evil.”

Abbas snorted. His eyes rolled back but he did not lose consciousness. Rather let out a contented sigh. “This one will not fail the way I did.” No, this blood mage would not come to him with petty curses. Abbas had found him alive in the infirmary of the orphanage and filled his mouth and nose with blood. His words were senseless babble to Altair but the _fire_ that filled the whole of his body had left him screaming for days. It seemed to him, that there would never be relief from it. 

(But it had come, of course, the quiet hum of a woman’s soft singing—drifting in and out of the inferno.)

Altair slit Abbas’ arm over an artery and held the glass jar beneath it to catch the flow of blood. He was crouching by the table, watching the pulse of blood—

“I have not heard that song in many years,” Abbas mumbled. He sounded very far away. “It is the song only Mothers know where I am from. Do you know the words?”

“No,” Altair said. He had not realized that he had been humming it. It had started to follow him, it seemed. The memory of it burrowed deep into his head until he could hear it in the quiet walls of his home no matter where he went to escape it. It stuck between his ears, reverberating outward long after he’d abandoned his bed to escort Abbas to his death. 

The blood mage had been in his house. He had walked through the rooms, he had touched the books. He had sat in the chairs. Whatever he hoped to find, he had not stayed long enough for Altair to discover him there. Rather, he had left behind a single line of words written in dull-red-blood. It had said, ‘shelter to those who enter here’. It had seemed to him a very poor curse to leave behind. Altair had considered that it was meant to shame him. 

“I do,” Abbas sighed. Then he began to sing them, slurred with drool.

\--

Malik did not go back to Rauf and Rana though he thought of it. He did not return to the high hideout he had found. It seemed wisest to him that he not return to places he had once been. Rather than seek the familiar areas, he walked in hopes someone who had need of him might find him.

Evening brought a hush to the city that was interrupted only by the hungry growl of the Eternal Flame. Malik grew tired of walking, wary of being found by citizens and hungry enough to consider going back to steal bread from Altair’s lackluster home. Rather than give into that impulse, he found a tree high enough to climb with enough branches and leaves to provide him some cover. It was an easy climb and there was a comfortable V near the top that afforded him a nice place to lounge. The advantage of the height allowed him a better view of the street and of the flame (snarling and snapping after its dinner). 

The Mages were the children of their God. He had been benevolent with them; he had educated them against the many other Gods that would try to tempt or destroy them out of spite and jealousy. The history of the Gods war on man was handed down through stories and song. There was nothing in all the teachings that indicated the eternal flame should _exist_. Yet, Malik could not deny the presence of it, the magnificent _overwhelming_ realness of the flame that stretched higher than any man could imagine. It truly must be powered by the Goddess to sustain itself. 

The thought made him lonely. He missed the certainty of his Mother’s smile. He missed the old women with the worn-ley-lines set into their wrinkled skin that spoke of magic more impressive and terrible than he might have imagined.

He leaned his head against the tree and closed his eyes. The light of the flame was bright enough to dance as red shadows through his eyelids. He cleared his mind of all things save for _Altair_. He concentrated on the man that kept nothing in his home. 

It came as a little bloom of anger in the center of his chest, clutching at the inside of his ribs with razor fingers. The senseless, needless death of innocent lives and the mockery of their loss. The flagrant, inhuman disregard for the abuses that were perpetrated at his command spread like _liquid fire_ through his veins until it felt as if it would spill out of his ears. 

(But he thought, again and again, of the boys he had met. How they had said, _he is honest, he says what they all think_ as if it absolved him of the weight of his sins. He thought of how Altair’s Mother had sang to him, how she had secured him a future and how Altair had repaid the kindness.) 

It was _inconceivable_ that any mage who had been given the promise of their God would turn against the others. They were all protected by the same promise, all connected by it, and yet—

“It’s you,” interrupted his thoughts. Malik jerked up, caught the thick limbs of the tree to keep himself from falling and looked down, jerking his head one way and the other until he found the man that stood beneath the tree. The man was looking out toward the street, looking as casual as anyone might look under the circumstances. “Do you need a place to sleep tonight?”

“Why?” Malik asked.

The man tipped his head back to look up at Malik. “I have a place to sleep and a safe way to get you to it, I _want_ a curse I cannot make myself. Perhaps we can trade.” 

Malik considered it. “What sort of curse?”

The approach of a small line of Enforcers made the man flee inward past the tree and toward the small park beyond it. He disappeared in the dimness so that not even Malik (who had followed him with his eyes) could be sure where he was. Malik pulled his feet up from where they had been loosely dangling and held his breath as the Enforcers lingered below the tree.

He could not make out what they spoke of but it must have been funny enough to share a laugh before they moved on, going down the street until they were too quiet to hear. Only after the sound of their voices were indistinct and distant did the man return. He leaned against the tree and called up along the bark, “a curse to share at morning Temple, to keep the devout men from raping my daughters.”

Malik curled his lip at such a thought. “How many men?”

“As many as you can manage,” the man said. “I’ve seen them in the streets, leering at my children.” 

It was a relief (in some small way) that he was not asked to provide the means to die again. He let out a small breath, “I will need a meal and a bed. I will give your curse in the morning when I’ve had time to recover.” 

The man agreed and Malik followed him through the park, across thin alleys behind houses and to a grand house at the head of a rich-man’s street where a long-long building stood in the back. Inside was full of mages, many of them women and children. They were huddled together in beds made of piled blankets. Malik stood just inside the door (where the heat of all their bodies seemed to wrap around him from every direction) and felt as if he had been transported back to his home. 

“Make a space,” the man said to the woman with only one small, pale child. “I will bring you something to eat.” 

Malik stood longer than was polite when offered a bed and then pulled at his boots to keep from spreading the dirt that stuck to them across the clean bed. The woman rolled her child so the baby was against the wall and wiped the space nearest her with one arm before lifting the blankets. She was young, (far too young in Malik’s estimation, to have a baby). “Thank you,” he said.

“All mages are welcome here,” she whispered. Then she draped the blankets over him until the man returned with the food. 

Malik ate with as much patience as he could manage (which was little) and when he was finished, all the women and children that had been quietly staring at him began to murmur their good nights. The man had disappeared back to his own bed (one assumed) and the lights were slowly extinguished.

He lay in the darkness, covered in blankets, sharing the heat of a bed, listening to Mothers singing sweet songs to their children. He must have fallen asleep because he was woken up by soft fingers dragging across the waistband of his pants. He moved to grab the hand before it could pull at the strings but there were blankets caught all around his arms. 

“Shhh,” was whispered against his cheek. The darkness was so complete that Malik could not make out the shape of body pressing against his side. He pulled his arms free of the tangle of blankets. “If you wake them, they will all want a turn on you,” was hot-breathed-words damp and strange against his cheek. The hand that was stroking his dick was _insistent_ until Malik caught her by the arm.

“Why,” he said.

“You are our savior,” she said. Every word was a small puff of breath against his mouth. 

“I am not,” Malik said back before he pushed her hand away. “I am no man’s salvation. I came to find my brother or at least his fate and I have found it a thousand times worse than I could imagine. I am not the answer to the cry of our people, I am the feral, wild beast that their agony has made. Do not think highly of me when I betray our God. There is nothing _righteous_ in my actions.”

For a minute, the quiet was as thick as the darkness. The girl’s hand hovered beneath the blankets, not touching him or backing away. After a pause, she said, “if you are to become the monster we have wished for, you are _our_ savior. You can spare us the fate that you shoulder.” The words preceded the soft press of her cheek against his shoulder. “You can have this.”

Malik sighed, “how old are you?”

“Eighteen now. A woman like me would have many children in the village I’m from. I would have been married for years. Do not trouble your conscience.” Then she slid her thigh across his lap and pulled his hand from where it had been pushing at hers to press against her naked body. “But quietly,” she whispered again.

\--

Morning came before Altair was finished with the night. The removal of Abbas’ arms had gone far more quickly and easily than he imagined. Escorting him to the edge of the great flame had been troublesome only because of the level of blood loss and intoxication the man had suffered. Still, Abbas had been dispatched and Altair had been safely back in his home with plenty of time to store the jar of blood in an inconspicuous, shady, dim space. He had removed the bones from the meat and set them in separate pans over the small fire in his kitchen. Then he sat in his chair before the fire, staring at the oddly offered curse.

As he sat, it felt as if he were enveloped in a comforting warmth. The air around him felt _soft_ , the stray, phantom touch against his forehead was damp and sweet. The singing started as the meat in the pan began to sizzle-and-pop. It came from the walls and the floor beneath his feet. It filled up the emptiness of the house.

He had weathered far worse torments than the memory of a song. So he set his feet to the ground and his hands against his lap and watched the fire to keep it _hot_ and _constant_. It took the rest of the night just to reduce what little meat and bone there was to ash. He did not have time to mix it properly so he set it to cool before he went to dress for the day. 

While he stood (half-naked) in his room, the soft-warm comfort of the kitchen leeched away and in its place was the unfamiliar sensation of work-roughed hands against his chest. It seemed like a weight was against his back and arms around his chest. There was no _confusion_ about the sort of comfort that he was meant to take from being manhandled (and no confusion as to who he might have imagined it to be). He did not luxuriate in the feeling of it—the ghost-touch of a blood mage who thought he was clever, the sort of man who was certain he could break Altair by offering him comforts that he did not _want_. 

He did not _need_ them. 

Altair pulled his clothes on but it did not stop the phantom sensation of fingers brushing gently down his chest. It didn’t lessen the urge to tip his head back against the implied presence of a thing that _wasn’t_ there. He curled his hands into fists that made his _knuckles_ ache and he went down the stairs with long-fast-strides. The bloody words were mocking him. He found the knife he had used to carve the meat from bone and stabbed it through the wood the words were scrawled on. He dragged it across until he’d split the letters. 

There was sweat on his face, all over his body, a sudden and complete wetness that covered him. He was heaving for air in the aftermath of the foolish assault. The feeling of closeness was gone from his back but there were fingers that ruffled through his hair and a kiss against his cheek. His eyes closed as his hands pressed to the edge of the wood and he let his head hang down.

“You waste your time,” Altair said to _nothing_. Then he pushed away from the curse, the impression of hands and moved for the door. He yanked it open and escaped the house to the bleak morning that waited. 

There was a sour smell in the air that was a bitter, welcome relief. He drew the thickness of the four air into his lungs all along his walk to work. His hand clenched around the silver knife he’d tucked into his pocket. It did little to ease his anxiety as he went, but it put purpose back into the cacophony of half-thought things. 

“Captain,” he said as soon as he saw the man standing outside the justice building. “Send your men throughout the city, tell them to spread it to anyone that will listen. We raid the Blooming Rose this morning.”

The Captain looked confused by the order but nodded. “Of course, sir.”

Altair would do what he had planned to; he would kill the whores that harbored Malik. (Oh, he would _skin_ the one that fucked him.)

\--

Malik could not afford to sacrifice any more of the easily accessible ley lines for a latent curse. It was unsafe (he assumed) to leave the windowless house that he had been invited into, but he had crept out of the bed when he woke up the second time. His intention was to find a quiet place to think over how to build a curse that would prevent the men from raping the mages’ daughters. He had only made it just far enough to wonder if he should attempt to remove their desire for the mages or if he should attack their _ability_ to enact their desires. 

His thoughts were interrupted by a quiet sound from the side. He thought it must have been another woman (and how vain a thought that was) trying to catch him but it wasn’t an adult that touched his neck. The fingers that poked at the glimmering purple ley lines was blunt and damp, the curious touch of a child. He held up his hands to show the glitter of the lines on his palms. The child gasped in delight of it. 

Malik had been so delighted once. “Shhh,” he said.

The child did not answer him but held his hand in theirs and traced the ley lines on his palm from the creases below his fingers to the start of the bandages above his wrist. Malik smiled in the dark of the small house. The innocence of this child seemed that it would die a swift-and-merciless death. Those girls that cleaned the temple were only children themselves but they had gone old and gray with from mistreatment.

“I will give them what they deserve,” he said. He took his hand back. “I cannot play with you now.” He crossed his legs and rested his hands across the bony rise of his knees. His breathing went even-and-deep as he tugged at a ley line, the one that ran down his thigh, where it pooled just above his knee. It would not take _much_ blood to issue this curse so long as he made it _powerful_. So he thought of those girls and the man that had offered to sell them. He thought of the little boy in the bazaar that could not be saved by their God. He thought of Altair-the-foul-thing born and discarded out of desperation. When his anger was _deepest_ , when the great _red_ wrath of it boiled in his veins, he drew a breath through his nose and he gave it a name, _impotence until dead, every man and boy_. 

He kept it centered in his mind until the ache of it verged into unbearable. He kept it until he felt the dark cloud bubbling under his skin, until it rose like a wound, swelling outward at the pool of the ley line above his knee. Then he opened his eyes to find the whole of the house staring at him. “I need a knife and a container.”

His pants did not roll easily over the swollen meat of his knee but they did come far enough up that he was able to cut into the ley line. The blood poured quickly, rushing out all at once in a cloud of black-red. It filled the container in only a brief breath and he accepted a folded bit of bandage to hold against it to stop the bleeding. 

“It will not take much. Be sparing and it will last.” He stood as soon as the bleeding stopped and pulled his boots on again. He said, “I must go. I cannot be found here.” He did not stay to hear their well-wishes or thanks, he did not look back at them to see adoration in his eyes. He ran as soon as he was outside of the door of their small-thin-house. He ran down the alley in the dim light, through the park, down the street. He ran without intention except to _run_. His feet and his chest and his arms moved like one great machine but he could not _outrun_ the gathering blackness. 

The oldest of the blood mages had been a withered, bitter old woman who laughed at the caution of the young. She had said, _you do not feel your soul tear, it does not hurt. Give it willingly, give it generously, we are not the obedient children our God desired but the defiant, bloody wrath he took from us._

Malik was stopped only by the approach of a set of Enforcers. He climbed the side of the house he was nearest and laid on the roof as they passed. The heat of the sun, barely risen, was enough to make sweat pour down from his hair. He licked the salt-taste away as he listened hard for the stall of the Enforcers boots.

He listened for their sighs, and for the impatient stomp of their feet. He heard them say, “do you suppose _Altair_ ,” the name was spoken with bland hatred, “is going to make a war against the whores next?”

And another, “it wouldn’t surprise me. I heard the High Judge gave him the authority to kill anyone who harbored the assassin. That’s—it makes my skin crawl. I was at the shore when he lit the boats on fire.”

The first made an agreeing noise. “But there’s nothing wrong with a whore.”

They moved on with the sound of a scoff and the impatient motion of boots. Malik did not look over the side of the roof he was lying on but listened until the sound of their footsteps was too dim to hear. He rolled onto his belly and climbed to his feet. The house he stood on was not high enough to see the whole of the city, but it afforded him the illusion of being able to see the shore. 

There was no _doubt_ that Altair would find Claudia and no _doubt_ what he would do to her when he found her. Malik bared his teeth the thought, coiled his hands into fists. He had only the briefest moment of _caution_ to spare before he slid off the roof and hit the ground. He rolled up to his feet and ran toward the shore with no greater goal in mind than to _stop_ Altair (no matter the cost).

\--

Like so many of the other house of its kind, the Blooming Rose lay on the outermost edge of the city, a convenient distance from the holy temples and the fine houses of the highest class and a desirable nearness to the harbor that brought a nearly endless supply of customers. There was a plaque by the door cautioning against any sort of rough handling, drunkenness or disease. And a smaller sign beneath it advising the usefulness of bathing. 

Altair had not come alone but the men he had brought were shrinking, frail things that fainted at the sight of violence the way a child might have. He left them to gather up whoever escaped the house. They would march the company of survivors through the city, parading them so that anyone that was available to see would know they had betrayed the city by harboring the blood mage. 

He opened the door without knocking (as they had not given the city the courtesy of forewarning, he saw no reason to extend it to them) and stood inside the parlor listening for the sounds of life. It seemed that the parlor was designed to insulate the noise of raucous music and drunken shouting from the rest of the house. There were stairs on all sides of the room that led to a higher level of the house with curtained off rooms. He imagined, during the busiest time of the business, it was possible to stand in the very spot he stood and hear the wet-slapping of sex surrounding the room.

He looked for a discreet corner and went toward it, found a door that was hidden carefully behind a tapestry (showing, of all things, the regal Goddess of the Sun rising the dawn, hardly an arousing sight). The knob did not turn with ease but it broke with minimal, direct force. The rear of the house was dimly lit in comparison to the front. The hallway was narrow and the stairs that led to the private upstairs were steep and thin. He went toward the sound of glass scraping across wood. 

The hallway let out in a kitchen. It was heated by a modest fire but there was no smell of cooking. Rather, a tanned woman in a red dress was standing at the table with her fingers stuck in dough. 

“Have you decided to listen to reas—oh.” Her skin had been pink with exertion all along her cheekbones but it went pale at the sight of him. Every motion of her body went still so that only her pulse jumping in her throat was any indication that she was still living. For a minute, a fear gripped her so completely he was sure she would pass out from the shock.

“I consider myself supremely reasonable,” he said.

“I imagine even a snake thinks it is reasonable. It is in the nature of animals to believe as much.” Then she pulled her hands from the bowl and picked up a towel to wipe her fingers. Every motion of her body was controlled but even with the forced ease on her face, she could not still the tremor in her grip. “Why have you come to my house? You do not seem the sort that would enjoy the pleasures we provide.”

Altair’s hands were behind his back (as they often were), he looked at the small shelves of spices, at the modest table covered in scratches and blood stains. He took a step and the woman stared at him with such intensity he imagined her whole body must have been covered in gooseflesh. Rather than watch her, he stepped around the end of the table and to the side where the blood mage might have sat. He had no reason to believe the surface of the table would be wet but he couldn’t shake the slightest twinge of disappointment that it was not. A crash echoed over their heads and Altair looked up toward it. “So you are not alone?”

“They did nothing,” the woman said.

“Nothing at all?” Altair inquired. “Tell me, why do you imagine I am here?”

The woman had fetched a knife from a crock of utensils. It was poorly hidden behind her back. It was best that she would try to defend herself. “Because you are _cruel_.” She looked sideways (just a quick glance) toward the stairs and then at him. 

Altair did not smile (exactly) but put his hands behind his back again as the thunder of feet on the steps grew louder and louder. Two women appeared (very suddenly) and stopped short with such exaggerated terror that there was mistaking how they had some idea of their inevitable fate. 

“Let them go,” the woman said. One of the others pulled at her arm and whined, _Claudia_ at her the way a child mewled at its Mother. 

“I will not hunt them. They are free if they can run faster than my men. That is as fair an offer as any man has ever gotten.” He looked over his shoulder to the door that led out the side of the kitchen and stepped away from it to clear the path for the women. 

Claudia pushed at them, saying, “go, run, run as fast as you can.” And they did run. Their feet were quick and their skirts were loud as they went, knocking into chairs in their terror. The door slapped open but did not close again. And the sound of his men shouting in alarm was loud enough to be clearly heard.

It took only a moment before the intractable screaming began, the trapped and panicked woman cried out for some savior against the inevitable. Altair looked sideways toward the door. “I suppose they spent too much time lying down.” Then he looked back at her. “You seem like the clever sort.”

“Why, because I am not scared of you?” Claudia demanded. Anger made her pink again. It moved her hand from hidden at her side to out in front. She was shaking with fury as her employees shrieked and begged for their freedom just beyond the open door. 

“You are afraid of me,” Altair countered. He took a step back toward the open door to block her path (not that he thought she would run) and watched how she detested the truth he spoke. “You knew I would come for you. You did not run. The clever ones never run; they stay and fight because they think they will win.” Then he pulled the silver knife from its sheath in his pocket.

“I am meaningless; killing me will not help you find him and it will not hurt him.”

Altair did smile at that. “No. I do not think it will matter to him at all.” But that wasn’t exactly true, “maybe a little. Mages are pacifists, they do not fight. They do not kill. You have seen them in our streets—they have magic the _petty_ , _soulless_ citizens of our city cannot _imagine_ that courses through their veins. Every second of every day their hearts pulse with _knowledge_ and _power_ that rivals and exceeds that of our own unforgiving, fiery Goddess. But they are still as they are beaten. They are _still_ as they are raped. They are _still_ in misery and _servitude_. No, he will not mourn that _you_ have died but that I have killed you. He will know, as you know, that your death is only because of him. It is _that_ which will hurt him.” Altair watched her face in grim appreciation of the words. (He did very much like the brave ones.) “But that is not why I have come to kill you.”

Claudia narrowed her eyes at him. “Am I nothing more than an excuse? Do you enjoy killing so greatly?”

No. “You touched something that you should not have.” Something that she did not _deserve_.

Oh-and-she burst into laughter so sincere and shocked that it seemed to surprise even her. Her free hand pressed to her chest as the eruption of noise shook through her body and when it cut off she said, “ _pathetic_. You are a _pitiful_ man, no better than the little boys who scuttle through my door begging for a momentary respite from loneliness. You stupid, selfish man. I had him as you will never.”

Altair did not bother her with threats. Her righteousness was so complete it would not have mattered to her. It was simplest and most satisfying to kill her. So he flexed his grip on the knife and pushed the table up against the wall between her and the door. Claudia did not run but face him with grim hatred.

Oh-how-he-loved the brave ones.

\--

The whorehouse was abandoned when he found it. There was nothing but blood. It was a puddle on the floor, streaks across the wall. It was a long carpet that drew him inward toward the parlor. There, lifeless and posed, Claudia sat in an armchair at the head of the room. Her dress had been cut open across her arms just above the elbow. Blood ran down her hands, dripped slow-and-sticky from her fingertips. There was no color in her face but a terrible white death that settled over her.

Malik went closer to offer her some small solace in death, a well wish that could be offered to those who were not the mages, and found that a series of small, precise characters had been cut into her flesh over her collarbone. Far worse than the disrespect paid to her by manipulating her body to sit with spread knees and bloody-red-gaping-mouth was the condemnation that would follow her soul to the next life. He put a hand on her to feel the heat of her body but she was cold and there was no method he could use to erase the scar that Altair put on her.

“They will be sorry,” he swore to her (long after it was of any use to her). “The Gods above us will hear their crying tonight.”

In his wandering of the city, he had found many places that were frequented in _high_ numbers by the people of the city. There were an infinity of targets that he might have chosen to enact his vengeance. The Temples where the men flocked to pray to their Gods and Goddess in piety bought by the spectacle. There was the massive justice building where they ran to whine over their losses and their fears. The bazaar was filled to the brim with bodies moving in-and-out at all hours of the day. 

Malik left the whorehouse through the open door. His feet left fresh bloody prints as he walked; his breath was thick and hot trapped inside the hood that covered his head. He did not clench his fists but let the anger fester inside of his chest. It filled his blood with the _certainty_ of his vengeance. The city was _sick_ with men who were idle in the face of cruelty. It was _filthy_ with the complacent acceptance of _vile_ men. It had abused his people, their faith and their diligence to serve their own needs. 

It made nothing but _monsters_.

Malik’s body was _vibrating_ with anger (unlike anything he had ever felt before), shaking with the intensity of the hate he had denied himself the right to feel since he saw his brother chained like an animal.

He shaped the hatred in his chest, he formed it like a weapon: layer-by-layer becoming an instrument of agonizing death. The curse he built matched the crimes that he had witnessed and it went like this:

_Sores,_ for the many wounds the men of the city had laid into his people’s backs,  
_Putrid sickness,_ for the humiliation they had caused,  
_Unquenchable thirst_ , for the lack of comfort they had offered,  
_Hysteria,_ for the slow erosion of faith his people had suffered,  
_Death,_ as the only mercy Malik could offer such an enemy. 

He pulled the bandages loose from his arms as he walked, left them in long winding strips behind him. The knife he had stashed in his pocket was gleaming-and-sharp. The burn of the curse that filled every vein in his body was a far greater pain than the splitting of his sore skin. He stood at the entrance of the bazaar where the open gates welcomed men-and-women from the city to shop. Smeared his blood across the unseen back of the open gates, he said, “every Godless man and woman that steps between these gates will suffer,” and he poured all the venomous hate he had built into the words. 

Blood was dripping off his fingers as he went through the crowd but the people of the city were far too obsessed with the comforts of their lives to _care_. He walked until he found the gate on the opposite side and he spread his blood again, “ _death will grant no mercy to guilty men_.” When it was done, the curse was sealed. 

He stood at the mouth of the bazaar with blood flowing out of his arms and watched the men and women that choked the length of street. The curse would not come immediately but creep up on them over hours. They would be screaming by nightfall, their bodies peeling open in sores there was no salve to heal. They would drown themselves in liquid that could not satisfy their thirst and rave like mad men until they died. 

The idea of it _pleased_ him and not even the blackness that spread like ink beneath his skin could scare him in the face of such satisfaction.

\--

It was an unfortunate series of events that the whores who had harbored the blood mage were lynched by a mob before they could be safely housed in the barracks for eventual sacrifice. He had heard it from a gray-faced-man that the women were ripped from custody and savagely beaten. Their bodies had hung from trees in front of the justice building until a force large enough to combat the crowd had been amassed to remove them.

Altair did not concern himself with that. Rather than waste time sorting out the horrified feelings of the men who had witnessed the brutal attack, he had been _obliged_ to visit the Judges’ surgeon to attend to the cut that split his upper and lower lip. The whore had not gone quietly to her death and he appreciated that the most about her. The pain of the wound was insignificant until the surgeons prodded at it with their dull-fingers. It was ugly but it was not deep enough that it required any special care besides cleaning.

When he escaped them at last, Altair went to Robert (as he was always obligated to do) and stood in his office while the man’s pale face went swollen and pink and his lips pushed together as he snorted-and-groaned in attempts to speak to him. There were shallow scratches along his head and neck, fresh slap marks across his face. His eyes were blood-shot and it was almost certain that the madness had begun to set in. 

“You should take comfort in knowing that I will catch this man. I will not fail you, though I will not succeed in exactly the way you imagine that I might.” Altair motioned toward a chair that stood opposite of Robert’s desk and ignored the widening of Robert’s eyes before he moved to sit in it. He did not lounge because it aggravated the scar on his back. Rather, he sat with perfect posture and his hands in his lap. “I only wanted to watch a moment. I am given to understand that you frequent whippings and other acts of corporal punishment as a means to entertain yourself.” Altair let a small breath through his nose. “The men of this city, the fine men of this office think that I am _inhuman_. They feel that I am a _monster_. I do not suffer your convoluted sense of morals. Yet, I have never understood how men like you could condone your own evil and condemn mine. Death is a release; I rarely enjoying giving it but I understand the necessity. You _delight_ in torture, you find peace in humiliation, you feel _powerful_ by _taking_ the liberty and safety of others. I am not monster when stood next to men like you.”

Robert smacked his hand against the desk in front of him. He made a sound like an animal, a wail of discontent that went on-and-on, growing shrill and then brittle before choking off. It seemed that he was trying to speak but rather than succeed at it, smashed his head against the desk in front of him. 

Altair stayed only long enough to truly enjoy the gathering madness, just long enough that the noise had not drawn a suspicious crowd but not long enough anyone would think that he was a likely suspect.

Physical exhaust was, unfortunately, not something he could make himself immune to. Altair excused himself from work a few minutes early under the guise of needing to return home and rest after he was assaulted by the traitor. His purpose was not sleep (though it sang to him through the empty halls and rooms of his house). 

He smashed the last bits of Abbas’ bones in his kitchen and he mixed them with the ashes leftover from his flesh. The whole of it he poured into the jar of blood he had taken and he stirred it with a large paintbrush. When it was finished, he carried the jar upstairs to the open window the blood mage had climbed through. 

Altair knelt on the floor with the jar just in front of his knees and his hands in his lap. The whole room around him was growing warm with the curse he could not wipe away from his hearth. There was a smell in the air he could not identify and a glitter of motion at the edge of his vision that he did not turn his head to follow. He _forced_ himself to concentrate on the more pressing matter of how he should trap the mage and _where_. It seemed inadvisable to lock him in a room Altair slept in.

He considered moving his bed to another room since the blood mage was already familiar with this entrance. He considered closing this window and opening another. He considered it very carefully. All the pros and cons of each choice was weighed and yet his decision was based on nothing logical at all.

Altair painted an outline around the window, straight to the floor, in a generous circle, up the connecting wall, along the joint of the wall and ceiling and back down again to the window. Outside of it he wrote the words of an entrapment spell that Abbas had been generous enough to teach him many years ago. He’d had the occasion to use it twice before (to try it out) and found that while it worked well enough on normal mages with ink and a drop of blood, it was not strong. 

Blood-and-bone-and-ash were the foundations of blood magic. The use of devout mages’ bodies had a long history (according to Abbas) of producing acutely powerful magic. 

When he had finished, he closed the glass jar, rinsed the brush and laid down in his bed to wait.

\--

Death spells and death curses were _indiscriminate_ about who they killed. They invoked a power that did not belong in the hands of mortals. Malik’s wounds did not stop bleeding and he did not have the space, time or energy to bind the wounds so they would clot. The inky blackness that spread out from the ley lines he opened to spill the curse was a festering chill that made his hands numb and his feet heavy. 

Everything around him was dim and gray, it was soft around the edges as if the world itself had lost all acuity and focus. He had stood upright and inconspicuous for most of the journey that took him from the bazaar. He’d only stopped long enough to steal a sheet that he tore in half to wrap around the bleeding wounds on his arms. It would not stop the flow but it would catch the conspicuous trail he might otherwise have left. 

By the time he made it to Altair’s house (intent, in his feverish, delirious state, on killing him), there was hardly enough energy in his body to keep from falling over. It was only anger that gave him the energy to climb the building. It was luck, not skill, that gave his fingers a grip strong enough to hold him. He fell into the room gracelessly and lay with his head against the wall and his feet as far as he could stretch them. 

Every part of his body hurt in a way that made it impossible to determine if some part hurt worse. 

A sigh interrupted his brief analysis of his own aches and he turned his head to look at Altair. The man was dressed for sleep, wearing a long shirt and thin-white-pants that pooled over his bare feet. He crouched with his back straight and his hands across his knees as he tipped his head and looked at Malik with some disappointment. “What have you done?”

Malik rolled onto his side, pushed one of his numb hands to the ground and reached out to slap the other bloody palm against Altair’s face. The curse was still pouring out of his veins, it would have enough strength still to kill this one last man. But his hand hit against the air as if it had hit a wall. There was only enough brain left in his skull to look down at the floor, just enough sense left in him to make out the shape of the words drawn in blood. He should have felt anger but he fell back to the floor again and laughed. “Just as well,” he said, “just as well.”

Altair sighed again. He stepped across the barrier that protected him and rolled Malik bluntly onto his gut. His hands were efficient (and angry) as he stripped away his cloak. He dug into his pockets to pluck out the vial of water and the sachet of herbs he had brought with him. Then he pulled Malik to lay on his back and unwound the sheets around his arms. “Will they come to find me before morning?” he asked.

“Not so quickly,” Malik mumbled back. “I want to hear their screaming, I promised.”

Then Altair made a disagreeable noise and stood up. He was gone and Malik was alone on the floor in the bedroom of a monster, thinking about how lovely and light everything in his body had become. He thought of the smell of his home: thick with green things. It seemed to surround him, that smell. It seemed to fill the air with nostalgia so strong it brought tears to his eyes. 

(But he had done it hadn’t he, he’d put a blessing on the house to comfort all those who were in it.) 

Altair returned with bandages. Malik tried to pull his hands away and Altair pinned his arm down with one knee across his palm as he chewed the herbs and spit them out in gummy little balls. They rolled between his fingers before he pushed them into the gaping wounds. When he was finished he poured the blessed water with tender care.

Malik did not scream but the pain was _immense_. It was _fire_ and he pulled his arms up to shake the water and the herbs out again. Death was mercy far more palatable than the agony of this. But Altair straddled his legs and caught his wrists to pin them down against the ground. He held them still until the fight exhausted Malik and then he sat on his lap with ease and bound his wounds with lengths of clothes bearing inky lines of spells.

Malik coughed but he meant to laugh. He was too tired to fight, covered in sweat that seemed to puddle beneath him. Altair rubbed at his blood on the floor with the soaked sheets and then picked up the debris around him. Malik watched him carry it across the barrier. “Why?” he asked. 

“Your purpose has not been fulfilled,” Altair said. He stood there a moment with bloody hands and bloody knees, looking down at him with confusion on his blank face. “The whore was meaningless.”

Malik kicked at the barrier with his foot at the dismissive words. “She wasn’t. No life is meaningless.” But Altair did not stay to argue it with him. He left Malik to lay on the floor, aching with the curse that was eating through his soul, on fire with the spread of the blessed water purifying the black stains of the curse. Malik’s head was _throbbing_ and his throat was laced with pain but he had no _energy_ left to scream, to fight and when the forgiving oblivion of unconsciousness came, he went willingly into it.

\--

Altair slept because he could not have denied his body the need. He woke before dawn, to the sound of singing that seemed always just too far away to be heard clearly. He sat on the side of his bed looking at the dim corner where he’d trapped the blood mage (thinking about how possible it was the man had died). He warred with himself about whether or not he should check to see if he’d survived and decided (at last) to light the lamp that was nearest to his bed. 

The blood mage was lying in his corner with his head against the wall and his feet pressed against the barrier that held him in place. His knees were bent for lack of space to lay flat. The bandages that Altair had wrapped around his arms were spotted here and there with blood but the constant pour of it had stopped. 

Rather than wake the man, he went downstairs to his kitchen and looked at his poorly stocked cupboard for something that would serve for breakfast. Altair had fallen into the constant habit of simply waiting until he arrived at work to eat. Meals were available for all Judges of his rank and he saw no reason to go through the trouble of preparing his own in light of that revelation. As he stood and looked at his empty shelves, a quiet hum started just behind his ear. It was the familiar sound of the women that staffed the orphanage where he grew up. Those slave women who had made his bed and his breakfast and looked after him for years. 

Their faces were blurry memories but the sound of their humming was as memorable to him now as it had been when he laid in bed as a boy repeating them back so he could sleep. The smell of the kitchen blossomed from that space behind him. It was fragrant and _savory_ , full of the most basic comforts a boy like he had been might have wished for. 

His stomach rolled and growled but there was nothing to satisfy it. Rather he took the only dusty scrap of bread he had remaining on his shelf and carried it up to the mage. More suitable food would have to be found before nightfall. 

When he returned, the mage was leaning back against the wall, his shoulders and head stuck at an odd angle as he sneered unhappily at Altair. “This is no magic you should know,” he said. He lifted his arm to mean the spell work that he had put onto the bandages or to motion at the words he had painted on the floor.

Altair sat outside of the barrier and pushed the bread across the dried blood lines. “Tell me your name.”

If the man were shocked to hear the words he did not express it. Instead he rolled his eyes and pushed his heels against the floor to sit up more fully. It seemed to hurt him or cause him some alarm because his eyes closed against the motion. When they opened again he said, “fuck you.” It was a hollow defiance, as gray and lifeless as the man’s face.

“Is that an offer or an unusual name?” 

There, the man laughed. His head tipped back and his eyes closed. There was no humor in his laugh. “I thought you killed her to draw me out.” But he opened his eyes and they were _black_ in the dim light and _focused_ on him with the whole of his concentration. Even as gray as his face had gone from exertion and near death, the intensity of his _feeling_ was electric. The _fury_ in his grim frown felt like thunder that churned inside of Altair’s gut. “You killed her because I fucked her.”

“Yes.”

“And you imagine what end to this? I would be so grateful for my life I would welcome you?” There was not enough blood in his body left to pink his cheeks but air in his lungs that made his words loud-and-deep. “Why do you speak my language?”

“I thought, if you chose not to take my offer that I could just as easily put you in the fire. This city craves vengeance and calls it justice. They will celebrate the day you die.” Altair watched the man grimace at the words. 

“Then take me to the fire. I will never choose you.”

Altair licked his lips. The scab where the whore had cut his lips was cracking. Little bits and pieces of it stuck on his tongue and filled his mouth with grit. The fresh taste of blood did not calm him but the slight pain that accompanied his smile was reassuring in its own way. “You have been in our city three days, I imagine five days ago you thought that you would never lay a curse so against the teaching of your God that it would blacken your soul and take your life. Yet, here we are. All evil,” he said with no small amount of satisfaction, “ _must_ be answered for.” 

“How do you know my language?” It was a poor diversion but Altair allowed it since the man was struggling to keep himself upright.

“I learned it from the mage that killed me.” The he drew in a breath and let it out again. “What is your name?”

It seemed, for a pause, that the man would refuse him the right to know it. But he only rolled his eyes and sighed as he said, “Malik.” He tipped his head toward the window like he had caught the sound of something Altair had not yet heard. “You should get dressed. My curse has killed its first.”

Altair nodded. He rose off the floor and went to his wardrobe. There was no reason for modesty and so he did not hide himself as he pulled off his sleeping clothes and pulled on his uniform. Malik watched him with contempt that was interrupted only by the soft opening of his mouth when he saw the soft-colored ley lines on Altair’s chest. 

He pulled an extra blanket and pillow from the bottom of his wardrobe and dropped both of them inside the cage he had made. “I will bring you food when I return, and news of your curse.” Then he nodded his head and left Malik.

\--

Malik slept in-and-out of fits. The curse he’d left at the market place was coming to slow fruition. The men, women and (sadly) children that had crossed the barrier where he’d laid his curse had dug hooks into his soul and their agony pulled and twisted. They fought for freedom from his curse and it ached everywhere inside of him. 

He woke again and again with tears on his face and a scream drying in his throat. 

When they began to die, the blackness spread as calm and cool as a heavy fall rain. It blanketed the torn parts of his soul with a comforting lack of feeling. Malik lay with his eyes closed. The pillow under his head was thin but serviceable and the blanket kept him warm from the chill of each death. They bubbled and popped inside of his body, each of them a reminder of the inhuman treatment they had offered or condoned.

He thought of Altair, in between the voiceless screams, of how the man sat with his back straight and spoke without feeling. There were no blood mages in his village that had ever had the means or opportunity to use curses that killed their souls but he had heard that such a thing were possible.

(But no, he thought of his brother, and the life he had very far away from here. He thought of the trees and village. He considered Kadar’s ravenous appetite warring against his fine sense of morals. How Kadar had fought so hard against the notion of killing and failed. The memories were failing him, they faded and went dim, all except Kadar on his knees in the forest, his hands red-red-red-red with blood that _flowed_ like an endless river from the belly of the beast he’d killed.)

“Oh,” Malik said to the air around him. The pain was _worse_ than anything he had felt in the whole of his life. It was _fire_ and _needles_ , pushing outward from inside his skin. His bones felt splintered, his chest full of shards and lava. 

Death would have been merciful. Death would have been a relief.

But the house around him shifted, the light dimmed when his eyes began to ache. The air cooled to keep him from ripping his skin to pieces. He heard a woman’s voice (very close to him) singing healing songs against his ear. 

“Who are you?” And there was no answer. “Who are you?” and there was nothing. 

The people of the city were _dying_ in agony and Malik pressed his palms against his mouth and dug his teeth in until he tasted blood through the salt of his skin. 

(And he thought of blood, the endless, wide river of _vengeance_ he had poured into the city.)

\--

Altair had expected pandemonium and was disappointed to arrive to a justice building that was peacefully quiet. The minimal night staff had not yet given way to the full day staff. The secretaries were at their places with long yawns and quiet gossip but many of the Judges (most, wealthy, fat men with large families) had not yet shown themselves. Altair went to his office and looked out the window. 

Watching the people in the streets (always moving with some confusion) had brought him a decided kind of peace before. Those last calm moments before a great storm were the sort of thing that settled on him like heavy clay, keeping him in place when many days he felt as if the city itself would devour him. But he stood, and he watched the citizens as they found their way to the street (at last) and it did nothing but burrow under his skin with dissatisfaction. 

They—all the people of this city, the citizens, the travelers, the tourists and the slaves—were _useless_ to him. They were boring, cruel creatures that had spent the long years of Altair’s life in a silent war. The citizens with their pious condescension and the mages with their meek uselessness. He was surrounded on all sides by every sort of man that disgusted him: the loud, confident man with a fat mouth and no power except that which he choked from the good will of others and the cowering mages that did _nothing_. 

Out there now, hidden in the fine houses and low houses, out there _right now_ was a curse laid by (Malik) the blood mage. One that had power unlike this city had ever seen, one that defied the glorious fiery will of their own Goddess. Altair was _impatient_ to see it at work. He was _ravenous_ to get his hands on the evidence of (Malik’s) the blood mage’s true power. 

“Sir!” was the quick-quick breath of one of his Enforcers just before he slammed into the doorway of Altair’s office. “Sir, you must come at once. Sir—” his face was colorless, his words all breath with stray catches of sound. It seemed that at any moment, he would fall over. Altair watched him as he looked over his shoulder. “Something has happened.”

Out on the street, it seemed as if the world has burst into sudden full color. The temples were ringing a great cry of alarm, a woman stood in the street with her mouth open and her red hands coiled through her hair. Altair could not hear her but he imagined the siren-scream of her terror was the most beautiful sound ever heard in this miserable city. “Of course,” Altair said.

Altair went to the temples, not the surgeons. In times like this, all the men of the city would seek out the comfort of their Gods. What had happened to them was base, foul magic and surely the Gods would see fit to reverse its effects. He expected to find a clutch of sobbing spouses, a small gathering of stone-faced men bemoaning lost wives. He had not prepared himself and was therefore without an appropriate reaction to the sight of the whole of the temple painted with the blood of the dying. 

He stood at the mouth of the temple as the priests—ghastly, white figures standing upright over the cringing, bent bodies of the dying—moaned out prayers that they must have known were worthless. The whole of the Temple was thick with putrid death and the sound of raving insanity.

The afflicted were not separated by class or color, they were not divided by race or position. Every man, every woman, every child lay out on the floor and the pews crying out in pain that could not be answered for.

It was _horror_ that lay before him and Altair had to put a hand across his mouth because he had not felt a sensation so closely related to _joy_ since he had been a child. It grew in his chest like _pride_. He did not think of the terrible loss of life (he did not think of how he could bend this to his purpose) but relish the fierce, _pride_. 

“Altair!” one of the priests shouted. He pulled his robe away from the grasping hands of the woman that lay dying at his feet (screaming now-and-again over the things that had come to kill her). “Altair,” he man said, “what godless thing could have done this?”

He bit the inside of his mouth where the skin was most tender from being cut the day before. The pain anchored him, it dampened the joy and the pride until his face could form the correct shape to meet such tragedy. He said, “they have been cursed. If you have any kindness—kill them. They will not go easily.”

No sooner had he spoken the words than a man not so far to his side groaned heavily and bent over double to vomit across the floor. It was the start of a great wave of sickness, the whimpering of the cursed the only warning. 

“Perhaps burn this temple when you are finished,” he said. He did not stay. There was the illusion of hunting to be done. He left the Temple and the foul fog of sickness that was trapped within it. Out in the street, the shocked-white faces of his Enforcers were fighting back hysteria in their voices but one-or-two (that he could hear) was saying the word, “blood mage” and every man-woman-and-child still alive to hear it was going to carry those words like the curse they were.

“Captain!” he shouted. “There is a curse in our city, we must find it. Search everywhere the people gather. Curses this powerful must be sealed with blood, if you see it, do not touch it. Report anything you find to me immediately.”

“Why would he have done this?” the Captain asked, “why would any man do such a thing?”

Because the fine citizens of this city had trapped, sold, traded, beaten and enslaved the mages. The city had bought their good fortune with the remorseless death of _anyone_ they found distasteful and they’d wrapped it in the skin of the One True Goddess. “They are godless,” Altair said. “Go quickly and be alert. We cannot afford to lose ourselves to this curse.” But the threat frightened the good Captain and every man under his command. 

The whole of the city would fall into panic. (And if there were truly a God left in their world, the city would consume itself in fire.)

\--

Every person that died from the curse brought a strange relief to the pain. It did not soothe it but seem to cut it away entirely leaving an absence of sensation in its place. By the time he heard the door open and the sound of footsteps coming up the steps, the worst of the pain had already past. 

Rather than face Altair lying down (again), he forced himself to sit up and put his back against the corner so that he could rest his hands in his lap. It felt as if it gave him the appearance of more energy than he had. Whatever ideas he had about spitting in Altair’s face were far too ambitious in fact. 

Altair came into the room and smiled at him. “There are so many bodies in the great Temples that there is no space in our city large enough to hold them. The survivors are left in a quandary. They want the illness purged from the city, they want the curse burnt before it can spread but the closest, surest, most pure fire at their command is the _ravenous_ will of their Goddess. Any body they put into that flame will burn for eternity.”

“No,” Malik said. “That flame is not the spirit of the Gods.” 

If Altair agreed or disagreed he did not argue the point. Instead, he sat down with his back very straight and his knees crossed in front of him. He set a basket on the floor pushed it across to him. The smell of meat, cheese, bread was strong enough to make his stomach roll. “A gift.”

“How thoughtful of you now after you’ve left me the whole day with nothing to eat, drink or any way to relieve myself.” Malik considered not taking the food. He thought about it in the half-seconds of time he had between the spasms of nauseating hunger.

“I might have found a reason to return sooner with those comforts but it seems a blood mage has cursed our city. One hundred and four children have died today in the most gruesome manner possible. They did not survive the second stage of your curse, it was simply too much for their bodies to handle. I did see the full realization of your curse, the putrid wounds, the vomiting, the screaming cry for water that cannot be satisfied, fear unlike any I have ever seen before and _death_ at last.” The pride in the description of the curse was evident in every part of Altair’s body and voice. Even his smile, reddened with irritation by the wound on his mouth, was pulled up and pointed at the ends.

“Have you found where I left it?” Malik asked. There had been a handful of new wounds that seemed to open up inside of him but it seemed that they closed far sooner than any of the others had. 

“Yes,” Altair said. “I lost a dozen men at least that walked past it without realizing. I believe, once they were aware of their own inevitable deaths they found less—disturbing? Ways to die.” Altair watched him pull the basket closer to him with far more attention than was necessary given their unhappy relationship. He was quiet a moment while Malik sorted out the contents and seemed to approve (silently) of his choice to pull a ball of meat from the basket to eat first. “I do not believe you have come as an answer to their prayers. I have watched the useless mages of this city submit to every barbaric treatment without protest the whole of my life. The only worthwhile thing they have done is die. Why did you come?”

“You think I should tell you the story of my life?” Malik asked. The idea would have been repugnant to him days ago. He might have lashed out in anger or been offended by the immoral greed in Altair’s assumption he would. Now, it was _logical_ to him that Altair would ask. The man looked at him as if he were precious. His eagerness to know more of Malik was poorly contained beneath his expressionless face. “You disgust me.” 

There Altair sighed. Rather than retort (verbally), he pulled a knife from his pocket. It fit into his hand with long-practiced ease. The gleam of the silver blade was bright enough to catch any source of light in the dimness. “I will cut a ley line for every lie you speak to me.” He was on his feet so quickly there was no time to react to him. Malik put his hand up to stall him but Altair dipped forward and slid the blade in a precise slash across the base of his neck. Just a nick, really, but efficient enough to make a portion of the rash-like-web of ley lines go gray and cold. Then he moved away again. As he sat, he looked at the little pearl of blood on his knife with the same devout interest he had looked at Malik with. “I have seen your work; your soul is in ribbons now. There is not enough of it left to cast judgment on me.”

Malik pressed his fingers over the wound and stared hatefully at the man. “My brother was taken by the slavers. Claudia told me you killed the adults when the slavers brought them.”

Altair rolled his eyes. “Yes. The import of adult slaves has been banned for months. Whores are hardly paragons of accurate reporting. Their sources of information are less than reliable. The slavers that pass through our harbor do not frequently try to smuggle adults to sell. It’s more likely your brother has died while travelling, been sold to another city or was on one of those ships that were condemned to die because of you.”

There wasn’t energy enough to sustain him but Malik lunged forward with feral-instinct. His hands were out to claw at Altair, to choke the lying breath from his throat but they hit the slick, smooth, solid wall of the barrier. His body was sagging with weakness as he leaned against it. 

Altair’s eyes _were_ gold as Claudia had said but far more significant to note was there was nothing human in them. He did not even seem impressed by the attempt to hurt him. “I do not lie,” he said. “If it will comfort you to know his fate, or at least to exclude aspects of it, I can bring you a list of the condemned. Slavers keep scrupulous records so that we are obliged to pay them if their cargo is, for any reason, destroyed by our actions.” 

“My brother was not cargo,” Malik hissed at him.

Altair rolled onto his knees with his back straight and his face close enough the ghost of his breath was a warm cloud on Malik’s cheek. He said, “you should wish he has died, he will not be proud to see you like this.” It seemed like he would touch Malik but he did not, instead he sat back on the floor.

Malik collapsed back into his place, sneered at the food that had spilled and then picked up the ball of meat he had started to eat before. It was still warm and not very dusty. “What about you? Why are you this way?”

“When I was ten, a strange mage tried to kill me. He stabbed me in the back out in the orphanage’s yard. I did not die and that must have been offensive to him. He came again, during the months I was recuperating in the surgery and he poured his blood into my mouth. I did not know his language then but I have been told that the curse he intended would boil me from the inside out.”

There was nothing funny in the story but Malik laughed. “He was stupid. You are clearly a mage, anyone who has grown up in our world, any blood mage that has been properly trained can see the thin film of our God’s promise protecting you.”

“I did boil,” Altair said. “My Mother came and sang to me while I lay dying. It went on for eternity, I only remember that when it stopped, I knew that I had died and I was grateful for it.” A curious expression crossed his face, a conflicting sense of sadness and triumph. “I woke up. I felt nothing. It did bother me, when I was still a child, that I had died and nobody seemed to notice. The priests said it was a miracle from the hands of Aminali. They said I was blessed and I would do great things. They have always been stupid men.”

“What became of the man who killed you?” Malik asked.

“I caught him when I was a first year Enforcer. I traded favors with guard who worked nights in the barrack. I put Abbas in the deepest hole in the city, I locked the door and I left him there. When I needed answers or education on matters that were of interest to me, I went back to ask him. He resisted and I cut him.” Altair spread his fingers across the spell he’d drawn in blood. “This is all that’s left of him.”

“Is that what you imagine you’ll do to me?” Malik asked.

“No. My interest in you is much less violent. I will have you or, when it is convenient for me, I will throw you in the fire.” Then he nodded his head and got to his feet. “I will return. Eat.”

\--

The chairs in his house were too soft. It had been an oversight that he had allowed the home to be furnished before he moved in. They had meant well, the ladies who installed his furnishings had been delighted to explain how they found him the most luxurious items (he could afford) because it was important that young Judge like himself have a place to rest comfortably. Altair could not rest comfortably when he could not keep his back straight. The chairs were too easy to sink into, too easy to slouch against. They demanded a level of average comfort that was hellish to endure.

Still, he sat as he replayed the conversation he had shared with Malik. He sat and thought of the whole day behind him. The citizens did not need to be told that it had been the work of the blood mage. They were on a point of collapse, the moral order of the city would crumble at any moment. It was the single most glorious thing he was likely to see in his lifetime and he could not bring himself to go out into the streets and observe it.

Rather, he waited until he could stand it no longer. The he gathered the necessities he had overlooked that morning and then went back to his room. He left the minor comforts he had to offer inside of the barrier for Malik then Altair undressed without looking at the blood mage directly (but felt him staring the same as he had done before) as he pulled on his sleeping clothes. When he was dressed again (for bed), Altair stood near the end of his bed. Indecision kept him from moving to sit by Malik or getting into bed. 

The matter was settled by the way Malik pulled his pillow to him and lay on his side facing away from him. It was a clear enough sign that he was unwanted. Altair stayed only a moment longer before nodding to himself and climbing into bed. 

\--

Malik slept because the blessing he’d laid on the house lulled him to sleep. The floor should have been cold, hard and uncomfortable but it seemed to sink around him like the familiar beds of his home. He might have been distracted by pain or the tight fullness of his stomach (from eating far too much, too quickly) but the sound of lullabies and the sweet reassuring brush of fingers through his hair overcame him.

It was not dawn when he woke up, but the darkest part of night. The window over his head was open just enough to let in the smell of the ever-burning fire. The putrid stink of it fighting the blessing that spread around him like the lush, green smell of his home. Malik sat up and rubbed his arms through the bandages. There was no pain in them now. All that had passed his curse were dead. 

His fingers found the tied-off ends of the bandage in the dark and ripped them. The length of his sleeve was rolled at his elbow to keep it from getting in the way. He pulled at the bandages until they were on the floor in bloody heaps. The skin felt split open still but not as deep or tender as it had been when he opened the ley lines to release the curse. It was too dark to see by any natural means so he concentrated on the beat of his heart and his faith in his God. The warmth spread out from his heart as light, filling up the ley lines under his skin until they glowed a faint purplish-red. Where they were slit down the center, the edges glowed pink and showed the depth of the wound. 

Accelerated healing was possible through a combination of many blessings, all of them carefully balanced together to ensure wounds healed quickly, cleanly and thoroughly. It was the sort of magic that Malik had _heard_ of from the wise men of the great mountain temples but it was not something that he had ever _seen_ or even that he knew how to do himself. The bandages that Altair had put on him were covered in tiny-black-symbols that all together must have completed the spell to heal his arms. These wounds that should have been deep and festered were barely scratches. 

Malik looked across the room to where the man slept. The rise and fall of his breath was either a careful ruse or genuine sleep. (Either seemed possible in light of the fact that the man had no soul.) It would be so very simple to sneak across the floor on tender feet and gut the man where he lay. Altair had magic but it was infantile magic, the sort of thing that a curious child might have been able to accomplish out in the forest. His ley lines were as weak as his belief in their God: pale, pink and thin. 

Yet, his written magic: these runes and blessings were _powerful_ things. Malik could not have broken the barrier around him even if he had full strength. There was no crack, no loop hole, and no exploitable weakness to find. If he meant to escape from the confinement, he would have to find a way to convince Altair to _free him_ of his own will. 

He sat in his corner, nibbling on something bread-like left over from the day before, and considered what he knew.

Altair’s soul was damaged beyond repair; he was incapable of any manner of empathy and could not be moved through pity. (Begging the man for freedom made Malik’s stomach roll over on itself.) He valued _logic_ and _reason_. 

What had he said? That Claudia was meaningless. At the time it had seemed like a dagger that was meant to hurt him, but in the sober starkness of their new situation, it was only an observation. Speaking from a grander view point than his own narrow, emotional one, Claudia did not change his life through her life or death. (But it was _wrong_ and Malik thought he must have remembered that only yesterday. No life or death was _meaningless_ , they were all of them, as important as any other living thing.) 

What had Altair said? He had said, _I will have you_ and it seemed like a repulsive notion yesterday when his body was sore and heavy with exhaustion. It did not please him _now_ to think of the vile lust that Altair looked at him with but it was _logical_. The man would set him free if Malik agreed to give him what he wanted. 

It would take some work. Altair’s sense of self-preservation was strong enough that he had successfully hidden himself as a citizen in a city of men perfectly willing to kill whoever they pleased. He had managed to blend in with humans when there was almost not recognizably human about him. Malik had never thought of himself in any objective light before. He was not sure what was most attractive about his body. It most certainly was not the current smell or the scruff that was growing thickly on his face. 

He pulled his shirt off and considered his chest. The muscles of his arms and shoulders and chest were well formed after years of having to climb trees to save himself. He was lean and fast from running to catch his dinner and sturdy enough to travel immense distance. The ley lines that covered his skin had been made to flow with the curves of his body. They added a certain ornamentation that many people had found pleasing to look at. 

Altair woke up at dawn; he did not get out of bed but roll over to look at him. The cadence of his breath was only ever so slightly different now than it had been while he was sleeping. At such a great distance, with the light still very dim, it was hard to make out his exact expression but it was not difficult to know that it was fixed solely on the glow of the ley lines. “I see that your condition has improved.”

“Yes,” Malik agreed. “I believe it would be in our mutual best interest if you were to bring me a way to bathe before you left today.” 

Altair did get out of bed. He walked over with quiet-quiet feet and crouched in front of him. His back was perfectly straight and there were sleep lines on his cheeks. He squinted at Malik in the dimness, looking at the spread of lines on his chest first and then down at his arms. He lingered on the wounds before looking back at his face. “What will you do for me if I decide to grant this kindness?”

“I will be clean. Unless you prefer I wasn’t. I haven’t bathed since I fucked her.”

Altair bared his teeth at the words. He stood up again, tall-and-thin-and-straight up and down. His sneer was indecisive but he inclined his head. “Very well,” he said. He left the room and returned again many moments later with a basin of water, a cake of soap and a rag. He set all the things inside the barrier (where there was hardly room to accommodate any more things). “I will watch to be sure you are sufficiently clean.” 

The water was cold (of course it was) but the soap was nice smelling and the relief of having the filth of travel and many days in the city scrubbed off his face and arms was worth the chill. He cleaned his chest with less care than he had his arms and face. When he was finished he pushed the bowl away.

“We must have a different understanding of how to fuck a woman. If you want to seduce me, you will have to forget your modesty.”

Malik smiled at him, “if you had brought me warmer water, maybe I would have offered you more to see.” Then he waved him away with the thick sole of his boot pushing the basin of water toward the edge of the barrier. It passed through without incident but Malik’s boot was stopped at the edge. “I am as capable of pettiness as you are, Altair.”

\--

Altair did not make it to his office.

He made it only as far as the high street where the many fine houses were lined up in a row. The rich men of the city took such pride in the careful maintenance of their yards, the look of effortless superiority that kept their fragile egos inflated. Altair passed it each day as he walked to work; he had memorized the early-morning sounds of life coming from the street. 

Today, it was suffocated in silence. The only sound that could be clearly heard was the arthritic creak of a weathered tree branch bending under the weight of the corpses hanging from it. They were _slaves_ of course they were, two children, two men and a woman. Each of them long dead and left on display. Their hands were tied behind their backs and their slack faces were caught in that final mask of terror they must have felt before they died.

Altair did _not_ delight in death but he had amused himself with the fall of the city for many years. He had always thought it would start like this: when the fine citizens of the city finally realized the enemy they had kidnapped into their homes. Altair had set up the pieces of the city’s demise like a child’s game, he had spent half his life waiting for them to begin to fall. 

Triumph should not have left him with such a hollow feeling. 

\--

The promise that he’d made to a corpse was _selfish_ and it was refreshing to know that now. Claudia might have approved of it; it was hard to know what vengeance she might have sought. He had not cursed the people of this city because she died and he knew that as he sat against the wall and listened to the city beyond the window. Malik had cursed them because his faith no longer outweighed his rage. It had been anger that drove him away from his mother’s pious home to the blood mages that lived in little groups just beyond the borders of their land. The old women were withered with age but ripe with the same _fury_ that had filled Malik since was a child. The _unfairness_ of his life had nagged after him every moment he could remember but he had trapped it neatly in a box in the center of his chest.

Malik had convinced himself (once upon a time) that he had learned the art of blood magic as a sign of devotion to their God. It had always been a lie but he had believed it with all the power of his soul. But he had never been soothed by the promise of his next life, he had never felt hope that he would escape the confines of this one; no Malik had been born an outcast in a world of quiet men. He had been born with _unanswered rage_.

That made sense to him now. As he say beneath the window and listened to the sounds of the city being consumed. The noise was inconstant. It rose-and-fell in waves: the angry shouting of the neighbors as they protested the wholesale murder of the slaves. It was the sound of screaming as the terrified victims ran for freedom. The sound of the Enforcers heavy-breathed and thick-voiced calling for a cease to the torment. 

It went in circles, around and around. 

He fell asleep to the smell of fire and the inconsolable sound of crying at some distance. 

Altair was sitting outside of the barrier when he woke. He had a sheaf of papers in his lap and there was a fresh basketful of food waiting for Malik to wake up and take note of it. There was no telling how long Altair had been there: the sun was still bright enough to fill the room with sunshine but the city had gone dim with sound.

“What did you find?” Malik asked. He sat up and stretched the stiffness of sleeping on the unforgiving floor out of his neck and shoulders. The food smelled palatable (if not as delicious as the day before) and he pulled it over with no sense of shame or lingering doubt about his right and want to have it. 

“There were fifty-two adult males on the ships that burned. Thirty of them were picked up outside of the mage territory, fourteen of them were taken from a different geographical area that you appear to be from, that leaves six possible men that may have been your brother. Did he have any distinguishing characteristics?” While Altair’s voice was primarily toneless in all other situations, there was an edge of annoyance that spread out from his throat to his hands. It made his cheeks go petal pink with anger that was poorly restrained in the loose coil of his hands. 

“Kadar had blue eyes,” Malik said.

“Then he did not die on the ships,” Altair said. Then he threw the papers to the side. “If he survived the journey away from your land, they must have taken him to the Northern port to sell him. They still allow adult slaves to be purchased there.”

That was not information that he would process while being so closely observed. It did nothing to advance his cause if Altair was sure he’d found a soft spot. It seemed prudent to reward the man for following through on his promise. Malik chewed thoughtfully on the soft ball of meat he’d been given. “You’re angry.”

“The priests have abandoned their posts. The temples are filled with rotting corpses, the streets are choked with riots, the trees in the park are breaking under the weight of the slaves that hang from them and the justice building has been fending off an attack for most of the day.”

Malik smiled and he did not mean to. Altair took note of it and it shifted the anger in his face just slightly. “I see no reason to be angry,” Malik said.

“They are stupid,” Altair hissed at him. “The men of this city. The ones that sat me at their tables and forced their slaves to serve me food—the ones that laughed at me when I told them what would take over their city one day. They were _fat_ and _content_ to be only a week ago and now they are mad-dogs, killing whatever scares them. They search for you in every corner of the city. They howl at the doors of my office that I have not found you. Each of them stained with the blood of the men and women they have killed.”

“They will consume themselves,” Malik said.

“They should _burn_ ,” Altair snapped at him. “They should line themselves up along the stairs of the Eternal Flame and fling themselves into it. They are the _corrupt soul_ of this entire world, the festering boil that disgraces the human race. Death is too good a fate for these men.”

Malik snorted at that. “You think you are not one of them?”

“I have seen the men elected to govern this city stand whistling in appreciation of the rape of a child. I have seen them congratulate the boy how humiliated her and send her limping back to her place. I’ve seen the fate of her mongrel child. I kill them. I’ve killed every mage that I have had the right or permission to kill because their complacency in the face of brutality _disgusts_ me. I am dead,” he said at the end, as if it were something that could excuse his actions entirely. 

“You are a mage,” Malik said.

Altair licked his lips as he looked to the side (away from Malik). When he looked back again, his composure had cracked. There was no arrogance in the deadened stare. “I am a product of the city where I was born, a thing that is devoid of feeling and excused of guilt. I am no mage.” 

No, he was not. Malik could not disagree with him. “Then you are angry that your Mother is dying. You shouldn’t be. She deserved to die.”

Altair did not smile but there was the faintest look of amusement at the edges of his mouth. “I am not angry that my Mother is dying. I am angry that my Mother has lit the ground on fire and is now shrieking about how she will die. Stupidity is offensive to me.” But then he only sighed. “Enough of this. They will destroy themselves regardless of how long we talk about them.”

“If you leave me, they will find me and I cannot defend myself.” Malik did not have a desire to be watched over at all moments of the day but his only chance at escape lay with Altair. “What would you do to them then?”

“If they touched you?” Altair said. He did not even take a moment to ponder it. “I would show them the truest meaning of wrath. I have studied the runes of your people for years, I have perfected the art of them. I can lay waste to this city if I wished it.”

There was satisfaction in the knowledge of that. Malik considered the uses of that, considered how he could bend Altair to his will (and how it would be so _easy_ when the man had laid out his wishes so boldly) and considered the lingering anger he had toward him. With the smell of fire and putrid death slipping in through the open window, Malik felt warm and forgiving. He leaned against the wall while he ate, let his body be loose and watched Altair without aggression. Absent the film of hatred he felt, Altair was not without some merit. Physically, he was an exceptional specimen. His face was not entirely attractive (too diluted with the white man’s blood) but it was handsome enough that it wouldn’t be a chore to have sex with him. 

“I have seen as much,” Malik said. “How did you learn?” It took only minimal concentration to make the ley lines on his chest glimmer with light. It was only enough to make Altair look away from his face, enough to make him stare with confused intention. His eyes were heavy as they followed all the lines down-and-down to the waistband of his pants and frowned mournfully about his view being obstructed. “Do not mistake my momentary peace for forgiveness. You have hurt our people _grievously_.”

Then Altair _did_ smile at him. “When we are dead and they line up our debt one beside the other, I think you will find that the cruelty and quantity of your kills far outweighs my own. I learned from many different sources. I don’t care to tell you more.” Then he got to his feet. “I will return.” He left before Malik could fashion a decent reply.

\--

There had never been a plan; Altair’s fantasies about watching the city consume itself had been idle distraction. He had spent his life in the pursuit of destroying the mages and now that it lay before him: now that the whole city was consuming itself with uncontrollable riots, there was no clear path before him. 

Altair had only ever done as he was told. He had only ever accomplished what he was told. The only accomplishment that was truly his lay in destroying the mages. Even that was no longer his. 

He walked through the dark streets, listening to the inconsolable howl of the city on fire. There was no destination in his mind but it seemed _sensible_ that he found himself at Robert’s fine house. The house was magnificent; the house of a businessman or a banker. The sort of home that boasted slaves that numbered in the dozens and yet it was dark-and-quiet now. There were no lights, there was no noise and when Altair pushed open the front door there was no man to stop him. 

Inside, the house smelled like slow death. The rotting flesh of the recently dead filled the air with a muggy gas, the slick red-stench of blood had faded to a crusty brown taste in the air. Altair followed the scratch and stamp of noise until he found Robert in his office. His pale face was bloated and pink, his hands were coated in blood and his clothes were torn open with long-deep scratches that crossed his chest and stomach. He was _filthy_ with piss and he smelled like shit as he lifted the large chair he sat in by digging his heels into the floor and then let it fall forward again. 

He was _moaning_ as he did it, one long drone of sound that went on-and-on-and-on, interrupted only by a higher pitch each time he leaned his chair back and sudden low sound when it fell. It took some time before he noticed Altair in the room and when he did, Robert’s filmy eyes could barely focus on him. His moan turned to a shriek, like an _animal_ and he slapped himself in the head with the widest part of his meaty palms. 

“I should have asked what you saw when you looked at me. I think it would have been useful to know what you thought when you touched me. Are men like you so convinced of their own invulnerability, of their own _superiority_ that you thought I would allow it? You—of all men—should have known what I was capable of. You who were appointed to keep score of my kills, and still you put your hands on me. Even _animals_ are capable of better sense.” Then Altair crossed to pick up a paper and let it drop. He looked at Robert with his mouth hanging open and his dry tongue moving around inside his mouth like a dry-cracked-worm. 

Altair sighed. “You’re dying now, I can feel it. It will not be much longer.” Then he sat on the desk and folded his hands around the edge of it. He kept his back straight while he watched Robert’s stare lose focus. The man spit at him and turned his head. He shrieked as he jerked out of the chair and dragged himself across the room. 

\--

Malik did not sleep. He sat very still and very straight and he _imagined_ a fate far worse than death. There was not much left in him that could _feel_ the anger of only a few days before. It was lazy now, a distant feeling well hidden behind the cold comfort of absolute logic. Altair was not wrong when he said that Malik’s debt would be far greater than his own. The pile of bodies that waited for him when he died was a mountain. The people he killed in the bazaar alone was enough to render his soul a useless rag. His intention was _malicious_ and that darkness had spread across the city. It crept under closed doors and dug tunnels through the ground. 

There was nothing _noble_ left in Malik. Cursing Altair _now_ was as petty and as useless as carving unforgiving curses into Claudia’s dead body. The hypocrisy of his intentions did not dissuade him. He embraced it. Altair had drawn blood long before Malik had been there to fight and left unchecked he would spend the whole of his life in ignorance of the wrongs he had committed. 

Malik _knew_ the full depth of his own sins. He had felt the acute agony of his people, he had waged a (brief) war against becoming an instrument of vengeance. Altair had never had the pleasure of such experiences. It was _that_ which Malik lay into the fertile soil of his imagination. He grew the curse the way a man might grow a flower. At the center of it he put:

_Sympathy_ , for those that suffered  
_Regret_ , for needless cruelty,  
_Guilt_ , for that which could never be undone,  
_Need_ , for redemption that Altair might never find.

It grew in his chest, just beneath the thickest cluster of ley lines as Malik sat with his back straight and his hands in his lap, listening to the city wake up. The calm darkness was leeching away and the unholy shriek of another beautiful day rose like the battle cry of _chaos_ breaking from its cage. 

\--

One of the Enforcers found him in the street. He was bleeding from a wound above his eye, desperate with chalky-white fingers as he pulled at Altair’s clothes and begged him for direction.

“Run to the men at the gates, tell them the city has fallen into chaos, tell them to pull the army back inside the walls to end the riots. Then go the boats and find a man that will take you to the northern port, tell the commanders there that our city has fallen.” Every word he said was only to keep the poor man busy for those last few moments of his life. But it seemed like hope in his eyes as he nodded his head and turned to run toward the gates.

Altair did not watch to see when he fell. He went _home_ to meet his fate. The house greeted him like a sweet-cheeked-lover, with the smell of his favorite food lingering so thickly in the air it was a taste on his tongue and the sound of _contentment_ a strange white noise that eased the tension of his shoulders. He climbed the stairs with a paradoxical desire that he would not find the blood mage there and that he would find Malik still waiting for him. 

There was no naming the emotion he felt when he entered his bedroom and found Malik sitting where he had been left. It was a mockery of relief, a quiet but insistent surge of heat in his belly and some willful acceptance of the inevitable. Altair had _trapped_ his own death (and _oh_ , what a death it would be). 

“It does not seem fair,” Altair said. Malik looked up at him with one of his eyebrows lifting toward his hairline. “I have searched the greater part of my life for you.” He crouched as he said it, let his body fold in one long motion. “I have imagined what you might be since I decided that all of the whimpering mages of the city deserved their own inevitable deaths. I brought you here, as surely as any other instrument of Fate. It seems unfair that you will become me. Does that not seem unfair to you?” He was close enough that he could reach out and touch Malik’s face but he did not. 

“Fairness is not an expectation that mages are allowed. Our God did not promise us _fairness_. He promised us _suffering_ and he commanded that we endure it. I imagine, if there were ever a true sense of fairness in our world, if there were a great scale that must be balanced: when your evil ceases, another must begin.” Malik did tip his head, “it is not fair that you have brought me here. It is not fair that you have _taken_ all this from me and I have nothing to give in return.”

Altair fell onto his knees. He did touch Malik’s face then, slid his fingers across the bristle of his unshaven cheek. He ran his thumb across Malik’s eyelashes and gathered the tears that were not falling from his eyes. But he did not linger on that for long. His hand slid down, his fingers spread to drag across the skin of Malik’s neck and over his shoulder. He traced the ley lines that intersected across his heart. His thumb followed the arch of one that rose to his shoulder and fed into the many that ran down his arms. 

“Let me go,” Malik said.

“No,” Altair said. He forced himself to look at Malik’s face, to appreciate the anger that was still in his eyes. Anger was the spark of a soul, (any emotion was). “Once you are free, you are no longer mine.”

Malik grabbed Altair by the arms to pull him forward into the small space that was made for him. He used the momentum and leverage to get to his knees. His body was _hot as fire_ all against Altair’s. And his hands on Altair’s face were like brands as his mouth lingered across his own. “ _I have never been yours_.” But he kissed Altair in contradiction to the words. It was _hurtful_ to be kissed. The fingernails that dug into his skin were _painful_ and Altair could not bring himself to care. He shoved Malik until his back was to the wall and kissed him back with careless _want_ that spread his blood across both their mouths. 

His hands were greedy, spread across Malik’s skin anywhere he could press them. It was maddening and _unsatisfying_ long before Malik leaned away from the kiss and smiled at him as he rocked his body against Altair’s in a crude imitation of sex. 

“Let me out and you can have me,” Malik said with his hand framing Altair’s face. There was no lie in the furious pleasure that covered his face. They knew (both of them), that it was only a ploy to be free. Altair knew (of course he did) that Malik could not be trusted, that as soon as he was free, he would curse him. They would die together in this unhappy room. “I will not kill you,” Malik said (as if he could read the words running across Altair’s head). “I swear it.”

Altair tightened a hand around Malik’s thigh and pushed one against the wall as he jerked his hips roughly back against the teasing rock of Malik’s body. He _enjoyed_ the little yelp of noise Malik made at the shock. “Do not lie to me.”

“Let me be free and I will fuck you. I promise.” That much (at very least) was true. Altair had never been afraid to die and if he must die it seemed best to die only after he’d finally caught what he had been searching for. Malik smiled even before Altair gave voice to his agreement to the terms. Malik kissed him again, both arms around his back and his legs clenched at his sides.

\--

Malik had not expected to _enjoy_ sex with Altair. He had expected that it was a necessary evil he must endure and he was therefore willing to fake his enthusiasm for it as long as necessary. But he hadn’t expected that Altair would _care_ very much at all about him. So he was unprepared for the level of attention he was given. His other lovers were much like Claudia and the girl who called him a savior. They were useful, brief affairs that he accepted even if he did not openly solicit them. 

Altair broke the barrier that held him and stared at Malik as if he were only waiting to have his trust betrayed (and not so early). He had all but ceased breathing while Malik undressed him and stood with his eyes almost entirely closed and their foreheads pressed together. When he moved at last, it was with more care than expected. Rather than throw Malik across his bed and take him without care (as expected) he touched him with devout, sincere worship.

Malik was a _god_ in Altair’s bed, lazy and benevolent in his giving. 

Afterward, when he was laying against the pillows with his hair soaked with sweat and the unattractive evidence of having been fucked drying on his skin and between his legs, he thought how it would not be so bad to have a loyal dog like Altair to follow him. He thought, it would not be so terrible _at all_. He said, “why did you want me?” and he did not mean _in this way_ but as the vengeful thing he had become.

“Because my Father was a white man who fucked his slave and threw his son out like trash. Because she allowed it, as they all have. I wanted an answer to the last thing I could ever remember feeling, in my memory, all I remember is the _wanting_ and the _anger_ at my mother and the others like her.” Altair was lying next to him, sated and naked and content. “You will see. You have no soul anymore.”

“I have some soul,” Malik countered. He roll off his back and sat across Altair’s hips. His skin was still pink and hot from fucking. His face was unsurprised and even if he tensed against the inevitable he did not fight it. “I remember my brother. I would like to find him, if he is alive. I would like to spare him this life.” Malik considered it another moment, “Will you show me the city on fire before we leave it?”

Altair’s eyes narrowed as Malik slid down to lay over him. There was no trust in his expression or hope but a quick calculation of what was happening. He did not remember (or otherwise did not care about) the knife that was under his pillow because he didn’t stop Malik from sliding his hand up under his head to grab it. 

The curse was a violent coursing _glare_ bursting out from underneath his skin. It filled the ley lines of his left arm until they were _blue_ from it and Malik dug the knife into the longest and thickest of the lines. The blood ran down his arm to his hand and he covered Altair’s mouth with his palm as the blood ran. It covered his face and nose, slid slickly in between his lips, it covered his teeth and his gasping throat. 

Malik dug all of his fingernails into Altair’s skin as he leaned down to hiss the words, “ _you are mine until your debt is paid_.” It was _selfish_ and _malicious_. It spread from Malik’s chest to Altair’s body. And as it went, it turned his flesh _black_. The inky cloud that filled the space under his skin was _hot-as-fire_. It was the coal burn of pain that would _never_ cease. 

Altair threw him off the bed. He scrubbed at his face with both hands, coughing and spitting the blood as he stared down at Malik. His (golden) eyes were wide with disbelief as the last few moments of his complete lucidity, those last few moments of freedom, granted him the clarity to understand what had happened. “You should have killed me,” Altair said, spoken with the most sincere respect.

“I could say the same,” Malik said. He got back to his feet and Altair bared his bloody-teeth at him but did not hit him again. Rather, he sat very still while Malik ran his blackened thumb across his cheek to push the blood into his mouth.


End file.
